Chapter Text
no…you won't.
***
Her dreams are strange now. Inky affairs, like a lake so still it may as well be glass beneath a starry sky.
When she was very young, her mother read her books about the creatures who lived down where the strait was so deep that no sunshine could reach and the only light came from the stars in their bodies. Or maybe it was her father who read this to her? Pictures he showed her, illuminated on hyalotype—
Her eyes dart back and forth over and over, very fast. A needle pierces her arm.
The stars disappear and the dream comes to an end.
***
She walks onto the glassy lake and sinks sometimes and doesn't notice until she's sitting at a workbench, looking at the smallest proofs of life she's ever seen. Bacterial cultures, wiggling along in their glowy, microscopic universes. Sometimes they ooze and shift and form the shapes of runic patterns—
They think. They adapt.
Like an electric shock bolting down her spine.
Not a workbench, a blackboard. Chalk on her hands. The man beside her steps back to look at what they've written, his eyes bright and beautiful. Something equally bright happens in her chest. For a second, she can't breathe and when he looks at her that bright thing happens ten times over.
Miss Young...
"Apa?"
Bright vials, chemostasis tubes, fractionation apparatuses – from this garden of glowing glass and serum, her father's home congeals.
He takes the plate of bacteria from its place on the microscope stand. When he smiles, it's always a thin expression – and then she wonders: how do I know that?
But he presents her with something else.
"It's interesting." He sets a polished wooden box on the table, gently moving the microscope aside. "You never cared much for my work before."
"Your work?"
"Life and its alchemy. You always preferred– Well." He opens the box. "Look at this."
Inside: an array of brass gears and bolts and sheets of hammered copper all arranged like jewelry against dark velvet. Nestled almost at the box's center, a blue gemstone glows. Twilight colors.
"What is this?" she wants to know.
He lifts one of the little gears from its place. It's so well-polished that it reflects the full shape of one of the chemoserum towers over her shoulder and the blind waverider floating within. He puts the gear in her palm—
–why are her hands–
—and says to her:
"Whatever you want it to be."
Her face reflected in the gear—
–but her hands–
"Sky?"
She looks up. A different man. This one isn't her father, but he makes her chest feel bright all the way through. He smiles at her, the corners of his eyes crinkling.
"I think we're onto something," he tells her, turning his attention to his notes.
Her voice sticks somewhere in the back of her throat, this hardened bundle of half-formed words or a thousand jagged bits of glass, so sharp she wants to cry. He doesn't notice. Somehow she knows he's never noticed and that he'll never notice, and then she wonders why she thinks that – but his hands shuffle the sheaves of paper and he finds what he's looking for. She remembers something else, somewhere else. A little boy on the bank of a stream, holding a little wind-up boat. The sunshine breaking over him and her.
"Here." His voice pulls her back to the lab. "Come sit, look."
She goes. He smiles again, like they're in on some secret together.
She rests her hands on either side of his face.
"Sky?"
The room ripples, a reflection on water.
Viktor—
A crown of stars flares in his hair. Everything ripples again. An oscillation promising she can never come back here. For one moment, barely a breath, he becomes luminous and she thinks this isn't fair before it all goes dark and she's at the bottom of the glassy lake again, watching the universe wheel away in its desolate beauty somewhere far far above her, where dreams aren't welcome.
***
Starscream, always and forever, except when there isn't.
The universe clicks once to the left and she thinks she can remember who she is.
She never had a father. At least not one who mattered.
She peers at a little seedling. She had or has a mother who put this sprig of life in a glass jar filled with soil. She can see how the plant's roots grow downward in dendritic patterns, day after day, shaping its place in the world.
She stands on her mother's work stool to water this little plant. To sing to it a little bit. Her mother sings to her at night – maybe plants need the same thing. It's doing good, she thinks. It's going to live. It's wanted here and will have its place among all her mother's other plants in the city of iron and glass.
Iron and glass – something clicks behind her eyes and her vision splits.
She looks up. Overhead, a smoggy sunlight filters through a greenhouse dome.
There's a word for what her mother is and what she does down here, but she can't—
Artificers aren't like alchemists, love...
—"Sky?"
A woman who both is and isn't her mother steps into the greenhouse. Everything glows. An oasis in the city's smog, verdant with life. Her mother is very lovely but not because of how she looks. She's lovely because this little girl thinks she might have loved her.
"Sky?" the woman says again. "Oh, honey. I was worried—"
She gets close and the little girl spits in her face. Real venom, actually. Just like the hissing, hot-forest snakes that her father tells her about. The woman reels back, tarry toxins smoking through skin and fat and muscle. When she falls the dream collapses with her.
It doesn't matter.
That isn't her mother. She never had a mother to begin with.
***
The universe in its multitude of stars. The spray of so many neurons to match. Everything folds up and glimmers inside her skull. The stars, or her brain—
Click.
She did have a mother once, but she had two fathers also. Isn't that strange? Two lives caught in twinned orbits. Celestial bodies in the forever-fall towards a star she never chose – which of course begs the question: which twin and whose orbit? Who gets to decide?
She sits on the surface of the glassy lake where the stars are as bright below as above. She sees her reflection.
The dreams click just like her brain. Here's the truth:
Her mother was a botanist, cultivating plants that could survive even in Zaun, even where the Grey turned everything necrotic. Zaun, you see, is full of hope. That's what her mother would tell her while she fixed small plants into place in portable filtration tanks. Topside won't take care of us – so we take care of each other.
She likes to rest inside these facts for as long as she can manage. Sometimes that's a long time but usually it isn't. Either way, it's never forever. Everything gets itchy after a while. She never had a mother. And how would she know if Zaun was full of hope or not?
She died before she ever went there. That's the truth the rest of the time.
***
Rapid eye movement. 1000 times over. 1000 times again after that. Wake up.
***
"Who is that?"
"Hm?"
"Look, him."
Her father looks different. She struggles with this from time to time. He used to be much younger, but somehow he isn't anymore. She knows that happens to everyone, but it's different for him and she isn't sure why. The last time he held her, he was younger and unscarred. This fact clicks and clicks in her head like a stuck gear.
She turns her attention back to the small vanity he built for her, adorned with mirrors and trinkets and wind-up wonders. A picture – a color-tinted albumen print – in an elegant stand-frame looks back at her. In it, a man who isn't her father lifts her up in the middle of a sprawl of trees and shrubbery and green grass.
She's much smaller in the picture. Her hair is longer. Her skin...
Her father peers at the photo.
"Who is that?" she asks again.
He looks at her. He has one good eye and one turned green from an injury she never witnessed. Both look very bright, catching the dim glow of her bedroom's chemlamps. She thinks of deep-water fish with stars nestled in their bodies and behind pale sclera. Light through hyalotype—
"Tell me who you think it is."
It's not a trick question. He never raises his voice. He keeps watching her. His mute attention is more familiar than anything else.
The other man, lifting her up to the sun-drenched sky.
She looks at the picture again.
"He was an artificer."
"That's correct."
The photo enlivens itself – the sense memory of hands holding her, making her weightless. She hasn't laughed in a long long time but in that picture she's laughing and so the echo of that laughter trembles in her chest now. In the sunshine place, which is a vast green park overlooking the city's harbor, her father stands a few paces away, his face unscarred and his eyes clear. He watches them the way he watches her now, like a man making an account of the world itself.
She touches the picture frame. Her fingers glint in the lamplight, the flash of translucent white glass.
"He made prosthetic limbs."
"That he did."
There's something else—
But the park and the man and her father decohere into sunshine shapes. She drops her hand from the frame.
"What happened to my mother?"
Her father goes still. Tilts his head to one side. "Your mother?"
"Everyone has a mother."
Quiet. Maybe for a long time. Then he touches the photograph, his fingertip lingering on the shoulder of the man arrested there.
"I suppose they do," he agrees. "Think on it. If you remember anything, tell me."
That's what he always says when she asks about her life.
He leaves her alone. She sits for a while and counts a clicking feeling in her chest. The chemlamps bubble now and then, soft interruptions in the silence. 500 clicks.
She opens the third drawer down on the left side of the vanity and retrieves the box he gave her. She's assembled some of the parts and gears inside into half-formed mechanisms and she withdraws a few, setting them on the vanity table to consider them. One or two require winding and then they tick to life. Precise and ordered.
For a reason she can't explain, she remembers flowers, vines, and pale roots in soil. And the other man's name:
Corin.
***
A starry cosmos overloaded with meaning. Starmaps encoded in constellations, like messages passed down through time itself until they pour out of the sky and into her. She falls into the lake and sinks again, the star-stories burning up in her grey matter.
At the bottom of this nowhere lake she curls in on herself. If she cries, she can't feel it happen.
It isn't fair. She never wanted to be here—
1000 clicks
—her eyes flutter.
***
Her bedroom in soft focus. A tall bookcase, opposite her bed; several books fill the lower shelves, but the top two are reserved for a small parade of articulated porcelain dolls, gilded gold at the joints and so delicate they may as well have been spun from frost or sugar. Each one in a different pose. Pirouettes and arabesques and battements arrested in forever-elegance—
Pain burns in her legs. Her father injected something in her thigh a few hours ago, but it didn't help. Now here she's here, shivering in her soft bed while her dancer dolls watch.
When she hurt less, her father – a different one – used to take her to the opera hall to see real-life dancers. Lines of poised and pretty women all in white, moving with weightless grace across the stage.
Can I do that one day? she asked him.
He smiled. His blue eyes glinted in the light from the streetlamps as they walked home. Unusually bright.
Yes, love.
The night billowed around them. She walked most of the way home before her ankles felt too weak and he picked her up, the starry sky scrolling away overhead.
She remembers that he was the one to put her to bed that night, because she had two fathers, not one. One of them was named Corin. But also she has no fathers at all. Isn't that strange?
Two men's muffled voices, just outside her door.
Her legs burn.
Tears make her bedroom go blurry.
"Papa?" she tries to call, to no avail – her voice and his name crackle up in the back of her throat.
She hiccups instead.
Her blurry bedroom walls wobble and all her little dolls tip their heads, tilting their eyeless faces towards her. A mute and poised congregation heralding what comes next. The muffled voices through the door make her heart race.
Look, Ori, smile.
A carousel-click behind her eyes. She has two fathers and no fathers and her bedroom kaleidoscopes in a spray of starry wonder and pain. When the roselike shapes of light consolidate again, a pale man appears. Starlight at her bedside.
"Viktor?"
He smiles. Behind him, her little dolls tremble.
"Sky."
That's not my name—
Click. Pain comes and goes in starbursts in her legs, in her head. The man woven from the cosmos takes her hand and the bedroom blows apart like glass.
Click.
A bright, bright hospital ward. Now there's no pain in her legs because she can't feel them at all. Her hand burns where he holds it.
"Sky."
It's not her name. A nurse glides past the other side of her bed, a life-sized version of her ballerina dolls. White and eyeless and perfect, but still able to change the IV drip running into her etiolated arm.
Her body's too small. Too young. She isn't—
She tries to pull her hand away from the man, but she can't. The starstuff binds them, dripping from the place where their palms meet and from the joins in the walls and the seams of the ceiling. Everywhere, everywhere, she burns.
"Viktor, stop—"
She thrashes. The nurse grabs her head – the stars flare porcelain and gold.
Click.
No body. No pain.
She finds herself standing in the corner of an orderly study.
A man sits at a wide desk with a little girl on his lap, a glowing carousel projector set in front of them. Like any child not quite aware of their parent's love, the little girl has only a small amount of attention for the man and a lot of attention for the hyalotype slides that she can slot into the carousel. A long wing of light. On the far wall, the lantern projects a photo of a giant, articulated sculpture – a deepwater eel, suspended from the dome of the Academy's main hall. Even in the photo, its glassy eyes glow as if observing the little girl and the man with mild disinterest.
"That's where Apa works," the little girl remarks.
The man smiles faintly, kissing the crown of her head. His hair is gold like hers and the glow of the projector lamp turns it luminous white on the fringes.
"Yes," he agrees. "It is."
The girl smiles, clearly proud of herself. She moves the carousel one slide forward – click. Stars on the wall now.
And click.
That man – his name is Corin.
And click.
More stars.
And click again, until the wall dissolves and the cosmos floods into this little sanctuary of a room. The man holding this happy girl isn't a man anymore, but a gilded white doll, its hands fast on either side of her head.
The woman with no body and no pain tries to scream and the stars jag through the room like lightning in a cosmic storm. The doll turns to her, eyeless—
And click.
A small living room.
Not glamorous, but the tall doors in the far wall open up onto a tiny balcony. Beyond that, night has settled in glassy stillness over Piltover. The deep midnight blue punctuated here and there with the glow of other apartment windows and the lamplight adorning the streets down below.
In this bluing quiet:
She has a body again. This one is small and uncertain and her legs feel strange, like they can't quite bear her weight. But where does she plan to go anyway?
She looks around.
Between where she stands and those balcony doors, there's a woman sitting at a desk. Pretty, she thinks, the way her favorite dancers are pretty – but different too. She bends over a notebook, scrawling something, her bottom lip gathered between her teeth. The lamplight from her desk limns her figure in a pale glow. Not graceful like the dancers but—
compelling
—a startling word. Her Apa says it sometimes when he sketches his chemical mechanisms for her. The interminable motion of thermodynamics is compelling. It happens in the bodies of everything, everywhere. She understands him now. This glowing woman, lost in her own wonder.
"What are you writing?" she asks
The woman doesn't look up. She twists a strand of long, coiled hair around her finger and smiles faintly.
"Hello?"
Still nothing.
This little girl takes a step forward and then another, her legs wobbling, until something pinches in her arm. She looks and finds nothing but the sense memory of a needle from a long while ago.
It will help with the pain, Apa told her.
In a strange way, a thought that isn't hers crosses her mind very brightly:
Why should she believe him?
The woman at the desk straightens up and stretches her arms over her head, yawning. She has a smear of pen ink on her cheek.
"What's your name?" the little girl tries again – and this time the woman looks in her direction, brows furrowed. When she frowns, it makes the little girl sad. "I'm—"
Her voice catches.
Something clicks right in the space behind her eyes.
The woman stares like she's looking for something. "Is someone there?"
Me, me, me, goes away in an echo.
The room holds the little girl frozen in place, her legs trembling from the effort of keeping her upright. Gaps in time unfold before her and she understands that one day it won't just be her legs, it'll be everything, tremors and pain, and this woman keeps staring right through her, her gaze pushing everything into a shape that's wrong, and before the little girl can cry the woman's eyes go white like blazing stars and a creature like the kind from a bad dream like the kind that made her stumble to her fathers in the middle of the night forms itself out of the nighttime flowing through the glass doors and puts is long and awful hand on the woman's face and everything clicks and clicks and clicks and clicks the moment stuck until the little girl's voice bubbles out of her in a—
***
REM until there's nothing left to count.
Wake up.
***
She wanders.
Her father's home opens up into a cove, which is true but wrong. Sometimes she sits on the rocks and observes the wild garden of water and dusklight flowers. Today, the world arrives in a double exposure; one life extruding into another. Her house in Piltover was built of pale bricks and had a short series of steps leading up to a dark blue door. Her father held her hand walking up those stairs. She sits with this strange, orthogonal other-life until the thought makes something stick and grind behind her porcelain chestplate.
She never had a father anyway. Certainly not two.
She holds her box of gears and bits under her arm and picks her way out of the cove, the 360-degree rotation on her ankles balancing her when the ground becomes rocky and uneven. She walks with her shoulders squared, her back ramrod straight.
She thinks of her pirouetting music box and makes her way towards the light on the other side of a gloomy cavern.
A sun-drenched ravine greets her. A little stream.
A new memory bubbles to life. Winding streets and blurry chemtech lights. She used to know it all, the gullies blanketed in smog, always glowing, never sleeping. When she had a mother, she would walk with her through those winding streets, delivering plants in their big bell jars. After she stopped having a mother, and after—
click
—promised her life outside the smog, sometimes they'd share a quiet laugh together about the occasional topsiders who deigned to visit below the Promenade level. All of them always so overwhelmed by the rabbit run of the underground.
But down here in this ravine there aren't any chemical lamps and she can see the clear sky. She approaches a waterfall feeding into the stream. Something tickles on the fringes of her memory.
Time to sit.
She sets down her box of gears and parts. She sits by the water. The sun tracks its path across a cloudless sky; a vast dome of china blue encompassing this porcelain girl and her collection of odds and ends. By the time the sun sinks halfway past the rim of the ravine, the girl has fashioned something complete and elegant: a wind-up boat.
She twists a key and watches the small brass gears clatter and click and glint. The sunlight pours in a long, low spread off the ravine walls, The boat trembles in her hands. An emptiness opens up between her eyes.
I am more like you than anything else in the world.
This thought comes and goes before the past pulses through her hollow chest.
A little boy with his own handmade boat, looking at her. His eyes catch and refract the daylight like a cut of amber.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
She throws her creation at the rock wall and it shatters.
The emptiness between her eyes isn't hers, it's the measure of the chasm between her and the world itself. All the little gears and springs glint on the ravine floor.
The little boy...
She watches the last shears of daylight grow thin and dim.
When twilight comes, she gets to her feet and picks up each meaningless part, depositing them back into her box.
I should have let you die.
***
At the bottom of the lake, her dreams click through the stereograph of a half-lived life.
"Apa?" she asks.
A tall, spidery man threads a needle into the meat of her shoulder. When she whimpers, he hums and depresses the syringe plunger.
"Very good," he says.
Another man stands over her. Flaxen hair, the same color as hers. He lets her hold his fingers, his eyes ringed in a bluish blur. Not enough sleep. The men exchange a look. Her body grows very heavy all of a sudden.
Even her legs stop hurting.
Papa, she tries to say, but her mouth can't form the words. The world grows dim. All cotton. The last thing to leave her is the feeling of his hand on hers.
The next time she wakes, her legs work. She walks down an elegant hallway, a journal clutched to her chest. It's easy going, but her heart flutters because—
no
—the hallway dilates, a set of tall doors becoming ever more distal.
don't go
A needle prick.
Under her feet, the hallway floor breaks up. Polished tile islets on a sea of stars. The doors loom large and her legs tremble, suddenly weak under her. Purple light flares through the door's joins. She clutches her notebook, stumbling forward, and just like that, something—
clicks
—and she wakes up in her bed again, feeling strange and cold from her hips down.
"Ori?"
Papa, her papa, sits at her bedside, her hand in both of his. When she looks at him, he makes a sound she's never heard before and presses his mouth to her knuckles, his long hair falling around his face like a curtain.
"Ori, love," he says, his words muffled against her hand.
His tears wet her skin like warm rain. His shirt: blood splattered, his knuckles split and raw. When he looks at her again it's with wide-dilated eyes and a bluish tinge to his mouth.
"Papa?"
His eyes snap into focus, a sharp color. Five fingerprints glow like moonlight on his face. When he speaks again, she knows his voice even though she's never heard it before:
"She'll live, Doctor."
click
Everything off its axis. Her father disappears and then it all disappears. So goes the mechanism. Something ticking forward but not forward because gears are spoked and circular and where they start they also end–
click
She stands outside herself and not herself all at once. A little girl with porcelain legs sleeps and the same little girl watches her from just beside the bed and a woman stands next to her and she looks down at this little girl looking back at her, her eyes wide with a terror she not only recognizes but also feels because somewhere a nameless sickness ate this little girl's body, which is her body, but not her body, from the inside out.
"I think I'm dying."
"No," she says. "I think you're—"
click
The bottom of the lake, fathomless quiet and cold. No stars, no stereograph. Nothing at all and no one who would have come looking for her anyway.