Chapter Text
He could hear her again: The sound of her violin echoing through the Vent Stacks from somewhere high above.
She was always there, haunting the early morning hours just before the week’s end, the lilting notes of her music keeping company with the rooftops of the Undercity’s lower quarter.
It had taken Viktor the better part of two hours to climb the walkways and the fire escapes to reach his favorite perch. The Gray was thick at this hour, the neon lights of the catwalks and the business signs above little more than a soft glow through the chemical clouds, but he’d needed to hear her that night. He needed to hear her every night, the sweet notes of her song the only friend he had left to take comfort in.
He’d been eight the first night he’d heard her. He’d stumbled into the wrong person when his cane slipped on the oil slick pavement after he’d finished the Orphan’s Shift at the factory. He’d been beaten half-dead and left bloody in the old chem alleys for his troubles. Later, when he’d come to and finally crawled to his feet once more, a makeshift ramp to the fire escape behind one of the dumpsters caught his eye. It was little more than a sheet of plate metal, rusted and wedged against the wall to form a bridge up the unscalable part of the building, across which someone had spray-painted the words “This Way to Heaven”. Bleeding, bruised, and all alone at that hour, something about it all had entranced Viktor and he started climbing.
The maze of walkways ended in an abandoned rooftop near the Vent Stacks; a dripping water tank with a faded bird crudely drawn on it and a partially intact striped tarp the only indications that someone other than himself had once been there. Soot and stagnant water huddled together in little pools where the concrete had been chipped. Old newspapers, or what was left of them, had plastered themselves wherever they’d finally come to rest; wrinkled, and weather-stained, and unreadable. The towering pipes of the Vent Stacks stood guard over the east side of the building. They looked down on him as they spewed a steady stream of Gray from their open mouths, relieving the worst of their wares from collecting in the streets below, and sending them above, where the chem clouds lingered and blocked out the sky.
It was just an old rooftop in the Undercity. A bit higher and harder to reach than some of the others, but with the same limitations and lonely ends as all the others. Viktor hadn’t found heaven at the end of his journey that night, but some part of him had wanted too so badly it hurt.
He’d been old enough to know better; old enough to rationalize that it was nothing to cry over, even as his chest gave a heave and he tried to hold back the first sob that escaped him. Old enough he should have run out of tears long before he’d ever made it to that rooftop. The children of Undercity knew better than anyone that concepts like heaven didn’t exist for them. The sky belonged to the people of Piltover, and the shadows to the people of Zaun.
Still, his mother had once filled his head with fantasies of a life that reached far beyond the confines of the lower quarter. She’d woven him tales of vast seas full of salt and scorching lands covered in sand, and a mountain so sheer and tall and beautiful that the sun and the moon fought over who should own it.
She told him stories of the Aspects; of a star who fell from the heavens just to help people and of Janna, a breeze who had grown up to become a mighty wind intent on protecting the city of Zaun.
He loved those stories best for, like Viktor, Janna also went unnoticed by the people of the Undercity each day. He began to look for signs of her--out in the streets, along the rooftops, down the alleyways--with a childish certainty that every small change in the air meant she was nearby.
At the time, he liked to think that she was watching out for him especially, even if he couldn’t see her, like a real friend. He liked to think that maybe she might appreciate his inventions, even when the older boys broke them. He liked to think that she made certain he got home all right in the evenings and that even if he never had anyone else to talk to, she’d make sure he wasn’t alone.
His mother did little to discourage him, praising his designs for a brass songbird he drew out in his journal and helping him hang the windchime he’d made out of scraps of colored glass he’d found in the junk heaps. She’d sit by his side as he fixed the toys and odd ends in his father’s shop and she’d paint Viktor a lovely dream in which someday Janna would carry him far away from the Undercity where the older boys could not hurt him and the Aspects would crown him with stars.
He’d so wanted to believe in the magical world his mother spun for him that he’d kept the little steel amulet she’d tooled and carefully painted with blue enamel for his birthday, even as it might have bought him a meal or two. He’d prayed as his mother taught him, day in and day out, begging the winds to take him away to the endless sky with her; prayed when the foreman yelled at him for spilling the slag cart; prayed when the chem user had first raised a fist and in the aftermath when he’d been left with a bleeding nose and a cracked rib--but Janna never came.
She was a fairytale. A child’s dream, just like that ramp to the rooftops. Of course, he didn’t find heaven at the end of that path. How foolish he’d been to ever believe otherwise.
And as he stood there chiding himself that first day and trying to stifle his sobs, something in Viktor broke. Something innocent. Something young.
His little bloody knuckles had closed around his mother’s amulet and torn the cord from his own neck, and he’d hobbled to the edge of that damned rooftop in the Gray of the Vent Stacks ready to throw his hopes and dreams clear across the Undercity as thick tears blurred his vision and his heart ached deep in his chest and just as he’d clenched his teeth and pulled back his fist...something soft and light and lilting filled his ears.
It was a song. Her song.
And even though he hadn’t heard it in years, even though he could no longer remember the sound of her voice or the exact color of her hair, he was suddenly four years old again and sitting in his father’s repair shop as the little clockwork figure danced in his mother’s music box to that very tune.
The Bridgewaltz.
Named for the famous market street in the Undercity where both Zaunites and Piltovans once flocked to forget their troubles, high above the Vent Stacks and the Cultivairs, back when the divide between the two cities hadn’t been near as vast. Back when it’d been a famous love song about a man trying to reach his beloved on the other side of a broken bridge. Back before the enforcers had clashed with one of the Chem-Barons on the bridge and his parents had been caught in the crossfire.
Viktor didn’t know who was playing it: he’d never met them and he’d never been able to find them since, but in his heart, he liked to think it was the goddess his mother had promised would save him someday when he most needed it. That Janna was out there, somewhere, playing that tune and carrying it on the breeze to the rooftops just for him.
He’d kept the pendant after that and the hope that song reignited in him. His life hadn’t gotten any easier and he couldn’t afford a crown of stars, but week after week he returned to that rooftop taking in the sweet sound of her violin and dreaming about a life beyond the Gray and the factory where a fierce wind blew towards a brighter future.
One where he could afford a new cane and scale the rooftops with ease.
The grated iron walkways were becoming more and more difficult for him to cross and while his new brace had straightened his leg out and provided support, the brass scaffolding was heavy and seemed prone to catching every loose railing and nail he passed by. The doctors said he would eventually adjust to it. The doctors said a lot of things as he sat in their open-air shops on Butcher’s Lane, screaming as they turned the brass rivets they’d bolted to his spine and reminding him to breathe through the pain even as his nerves burned like an endless and scorching fire. They said he’d eventually adjust to that too, but the pain was just as blinding as it’d been when they’d first put them in and Viktor’s parents had been alive to hold his hands through the procedure.
He’d need to go back to them soon for another adjustment. He’d hit a growth spurt midway through the spring and already he could feel the supporting rivets beginning to pull as his torso lengthened. That was the problem with body modifications and children; the body eventually outgrew the machinery and had to be replaced. It was part of the reason Viktor couldn’t wait to grow up if only to avoid Butcher’s Lane. He’d be able to take the meager wages he received at the factory and fund his experiments instead of his medical procedures.
Until then, he’d continue picking up odd jobs at the repair shop and working the Orphan’s Shift at the factory and he’d return to the rooftop at the end of the week to listen to her song until he could find his way to the sky.
A famous representative from the Academy was coming to the Undercity for a council tour the next day and as he drifted off to sleep and the Bridgewaltz came to a close, Viktor dreamed of what he might accomplish if only he could ask Professor Heimerdinger a question or two.