Arcane Fanfic: When the War is Won

[kaffy_r]

Title: When the War is Won
Author: kaffy_r 
Words: 4,496 per AO3
Summary: Shimmer was an evil, Silco knew. A necessary one, but evil nonetheless. He wasn’t surprised that his people couldn’t move it into The Lanes. In a world where Powder’s monkey-bomb never destroyed her family, Vander keeps Shimmer out of The Lanes with a deal, while Silco and Powder meet for the first time.
Notes: I adore canon Arcane because it is a beautiful tragedy and character study, painted with transcendently beautiful animation. But ....
Once again, I've been drawn into the AU I created because I couldn't bear to see Powder destroy her adoptive family. This story was born out of things that were mentioned in earlier stories, particularly "Falling Down, Rising Up" and "Rumors." It is the fifth in my Changing Lanes series.
Warning for drug trafficking: Be aware that the imaginary drug Shimmer is central to this story. It is presented as almost completely destructive.
Edited by: my beloved dr_whuh
Disclaimer: I own nothing in Arcane: League of Legends, which is solely the property of Riot Games, Studio Fortiche, Alex Yee, and Christian Linke. I take no coin and intend no copyright infringement.

***   ****   ***

“He’s going to live.”

 Singed straightened up and away from the cot where Deckard slept uneasily. He turned to where Silco waited with Sevika. “He will probably sleep for some time. The young woman inflicted a rather remarkable amount of damage for someone without his … enhancements — quite the kick to his throat, I’m told; probably the only thing that would have made him drop her. He will not heal unless he is completely still, however, so I’ve given him a sedative, as well as another dose of the drug. Not much, just enough to keep him from being in pain.”

The eyebrow above Silco’s good eye rose. “Kind of you.”

Sevika wasn’t surprised when the bony scientist responded without noting the sarcasm. “I would rather not have to deal with this young man in the full throes of withdrawal, especially since he will have at least some strength remaining from his last dose. You saw how that affected him.”

“Withdrawal … Am I to assume that he’s addicted to the drug?” Silco tilted his head in the way that made Sevika think of the raptors that flew far above the Undercity. They’d die down here; the air would sicken them. Silco was all the raptor Zaun needed, she thought.

Singed shrugged. “It depends on what you mean. I watched as he took his second dose. He definitely wanted it, and I imagine he will continue to do so. It greatly strengthened him, to an extent that frightened people around him. I include some of your chieftains in that number. That kind of strength is a siren lure for people living without power. A young man like that, in a place like this? It’s very likely he will yearn for it, over and over. That is the psychological lure. 

“Physically, his body has begun to adapt to it. It is now beginning to react to the drug’s absence as well as its presence. I suspect a sudden complete cessation of my drug would be extremely damaging to him. And to those standing too close to him.”

Silco remained motionless for a long moment, then stalked back to where Singed stood by the sleeping boy. His bad eye, the one changed by the river’s toxins, appeared to glow a dull red. Although he was physically shorter than Singed, it seemed to Sevika that he loomed over the scientist. 

“I wanted this material to strengthen the soldiers of Zaun. I need them powerful, Singed … durable. I don’t want them addicted to it. Addiction weakens people. Can you adjust the formula?”

Singed looked politely disbelieving for a moment, but not for long. He regained the look Sevika had come to think of as empty science eyes. “It’s very possible. This drug, this — I call it ‘Shimmer’ because it glows in my test tubes — is … hmmm … I believe I can now experiment with the base formula. 

“We may be able to develop a number of variants. I believe I can tweak the original to cut down on its addictive qualities; that should meet your need for strength, but without that which you say could weaken your —”

“ — Our —” Silco interrupted sharply.

“Our soldiers,” Singed continued, unperturbed by Silco’s interruption. “Some milder variants may have medical uses ….”

He drifted off again, but came back to himself, and peered at Silco from under hooded lids, transforming himself in an unexpected instant to a snake. A wise and uncaring one, Sevika thought. “But the original formula will still have its uses, I suspect.

“All wars require money.”

He and Silco stared at each other, unspeaking. Sevika sighed internally, and began thinking of which of her people she should put on the sales teams. It would only be the weak who were tempted, she told herself. And when the war was won, she would convince Silco to end the business. She would have to.

***   ***   ***

Months later, Silco sat in near darkness, lit only by the river’s poisonously beautiful phosphorescence. The edged shadows of the river creatures occasionally shone with the same glow as they swam past the thick window glass. He never got tired of the life that hid in the depths. Piltover had no idea how deep the river was, what it fed and nurtured. Or if the upper city had ever held that knowledge, its residents and their governors had not cared enough to keep it. 

“Their loss,” he said softly. “Always their loss.”

He took a sip of the whisky he’d purchased from one of Piltover’s finest liquor dealers. It was pleasingly smoky, and it had a bitter aftertaste that he liked. The bitterness reminded him of how bad it might get for Zaun, before it got better. 

Eventually, it would get better, he thought. He wouldn’t need to continue forcing Zaun and her residents to make sacrifices on behalf of independence.

It should take little time to create an army of young men and women; better, faster, more powerful than Deckard, and well positioned to take on unsuspecting Enforcers and their soft masters. He foresaw a time when the addictive drug Singed had created could be gradually removed from the market, while Zaun’s economic independence could be won by selling the drug’s medical variants to Piltover doctors and hospitals. Eventually to markets beyond Piltover, he thought.

Once the war was won.

He would make that future a reality, he promised himself, even as he reviewed the weekly and monthly objectives in his and Sevika’s most recent sales campaign with their middle managers. The so-called Chem Barons had been helpful in broadening the market, but he didn’t trust any of them. They bore watching. Still, they shared his antipathy toward Piltover, and agreed with him that the drug to the upper city was an ultimate goal.

That satisfied Silco’s desire for justice, for revenge. Make Piltover bodies and minds pay in pain and longing for all the pain they inflicted on the Undercity. Weakening Piltover could only accelerate the independence of Zaun. 

Unfortunately, funding for market expansion into Piltover required a significant amount of Undercity sales. 

It will get worse before it gets better, but it will get better, he told himself one more time. Once the war was won.

Once the war was won.

Silco put down his empty glass, shoved his market reports back on the desk beside the glass, and walked over to the table where Singed had left a tray with tubes of the drug, labeled with their strength and capacities. 

Shimmer, eh? He hadn’t expected such a poetic name from Singed. Nor, for that matter, had he expected sound economic advice from the man, even couched as it was in innuendo. 

“But here we are,” he said, “because he said what others wouldn’t say.”

He went to bed that night relatively satisfied. But even as he approached sleep, he couldn’t escape the unwanted thought; what is Vander doing about this? How is he preparing a response to this?

Vander was a pebble in his shoe, a sharp stone digging into him and keeping him from complete comfort or control. He always had been, and now that Vander had escaped his grasp, it was worse.

Silco’s latest foray into The Lanes had availed him nothing. His sales force had come back damaged; from split lips and twisted ankles to broken arms and beatings harsh enough to land the recipients in Silco’s small clinic. And every single vial of Shimmer, every one of them, had been returned untouched. 

The message was clear: do not bring your drug into The Lanes. 

Silco was still torn between thwarted rage and reluctant respect for the children who had bested him at the cannery, but he’d come to regard Vander’s liberation in a way that made him uncomfortable. 

He couldn’t bring himself to say it aloud, even in the darkness of his own bedroom, but he was more relieved than he cared to admit  that Vander was still alive. 

Then Sevika took it upon herself to try to negotiate a way into The Lanes; she wanted to beat Vander to an extent that reminded Silko of his own younger self. (It also reminded Silco of a wronged lover, something he never said to her.) She returned unharmed, and with an invitation to The Last Drop. That threw him for a loop, especially when Sevika repeated Vander’s words about his kids being on hand. 

He accepted the invitation.

***   ***   *** 

He’d never been in The Last Drop, but it reminded him in many ways of the dives he and Vander had frequented when they had enough money left from their weekly mining chits. 

It was cleaner, and the ales, beers, and wine weren’t the adulterated slop their young and intense selves had consumed in horrendously unhealthy quantities. But the tenebrous and shifting dark of the place, created by the movement of people to and from the bar and relieved only by the golden aura of lights over each sturdy table and booth, that was very familiar. The feel of it — the same beer-soaked aroma and low, ragged  hum of any dive he’d ever been in — threw him back 20 years.

People had turned to stare at him as he came in, flanked by Sevika and one of her larger lieutenants. Most made haste to get out of Sevika’s way. Some there recognized him, at least by reputation, and they were appropriately fearful. A very few others, older patrons of the establishment, recognized him from the bad old days, even if he didn’t recognize them. 

As he normally did, Silco made certain to appear as if he was ignoring everyone watching him, while being aware of his surroundings at all times.

“Over there.” He gestured toward a booth in one shadowed corner. The three of them moved through the crowded room, and people scrambled to clear a path for them. 

“Should I tell him you’re here?” Sevika asked. “He’s tending bar over there and I can bring him over.”

“Oh, he’s perfectly aware that I’m here. Stay; sit. Both of you.”

Sevika and her lieutenant crowded into one side of the booth, both of them visibly unnerved by sitting with their backs to the rest of the room. Silco sat in comfort, eyeing his surroundings, but saving most of his attention for Vander, who was slowly wiping down the surface of his bar. 

As he had been when he got his first real look at Vander in the cannery, Silco was again shocked by how old Vander seemed with the grey in his hair and beard. But the man never lost the bull’s physique that had commanded respect from Silco and so many others back so many years ago. 

Silco wondered if Vander’s leg, the one he’d stabbed in his own desperate fight to reach the river’s surface, ever pained him the way Silco’s eye constantly throbbed. He hoped so; in fact, he might have asked Vander that question back when Vander was secured in that chair, had things not gone so ridiculously sideways. 

Vander lifted his head. He turned directly to Silco’s booth. He nodded a not-quite-greeting and then banged on the bar once, twice, and again. The sound was enough to cause head after head to swivel in his direction. 

“Drink up. The Last Drop is closing in two minutes,” he said. He didn’t have to shout. Just as it had been in their youth, Vander’s voice carried, and everyone listened. Someone started to complain, but shut up when Vander hit the bar top again, hard. Within a minute, everyone had carried coin to the bar or thrown it on the tables they were vacating. Within two minutes, Vander had come out from behind the bar, and had shut and locked the front door.

He came to the booth, and towered over it impressively. Sevika started to her feet, only to settle again at Silco’s gesture.

“Didn’t think you’d come,” Vander said.

“Why would you think that?” Silco wasn’t being sarcastic; he was truly curious.

“Why’d you think?” The fact that Vander, who was clearly angry, was successfully reining that anger in, was remarkable, Silco thought. He never could do that in the old days.

Silco abruptly realized that there was no way Vander could sit down in the booth with its current occupants in place. “Sevika — you two stand guard at the door.”

“Are you sure?” Oh, Sevika wanted to hear the conversation, Silco thought, 

Well, he could allow that. “You — guard the door. Sevika, you sit over there, just in case our host decides to make the conversation more … dynamic.”

Silco hated the warmth he felt inside when he heard Vander’s full throated laugh.

The big man quieted, and his face became stone. He slid into the booth across from Silco. “I’ll make this part of the conversation quick. The Lanes will continue to be Shimmer-free. Your people will continue to be sent back to you with their merchandise untouched. On the other hand, your people will come back injured. I don’t want to send anyone back dead, so I hope — I truly hope, old friend — you will not provoke that.”

Silco couldn’t help the snarl. “And what in god’s name makes you think you have the power to stop me — us?” He had meant to say “us” and Vander had wrung that “me” from him. He writhed just a little bit internally.   

Vander’s expression wasn’t a smile, not really. “When the kids rescued me, and we brought Powder back here, we were guarded by people who cared for The Lanes. They cared for The Last Drop. They cared for the kids you planned to kill once you’d killed me. None of your goons got in, not that night, and not any night since. The Lanes are family.

“It’s a family you could have been part of.”

His glower somehow managed to be sorrowful, or perhaps Silco was just imagining it. It enraged him.

“Traitor. Betrayer.” He managed to make those two words calm. 

They hit Vander hard. He flinched, and was silent for so long that Silco found himself hoping he could rise from the booth and leave. This had been a mistake — 

“What I did that night to you … I have never forgiven myself. Never. I couldn’t even bring myself to beg your forgiveness. Even if I had, you would have had every reason to knife me again, just for what I did.” Vander’s eyes swam with anguish that Silco didn’t want to see. 

“Time passes,” he said. “We’re here now.” 

Silco didn’t mean for it to come out sounding like forgiveness. He shut his good eye and looked at Vander through the red and painful haze of his damaged one. That was good, he thought. He couldn’t afford to deal in forgiveness. Not for this man. 

Behind him, a door scraped open, and Silco heard the shuffle of multiple feet. He started to rise, but Vander put out a hand. “I told Sevika to tell you my kids might show up. They have a stake in this, and an interest in you, too.”

Well, he might as well acknowledge them; he’d had them followed for some time, even knew their names. He could be generous. Silco turned, and found himself the object of hostile inspection by four youngsters.

Vi, apparently short for Violet, the pink-haired one; she was the one who’d impressed him with her fearlessness and fighting prowess on the bridge, and she was obviously the leader. Deckard had told him that, of course, but seeing her in action had cemented his impression. Right now, she was looking daggers at him under her considerable eyebrows. She wanted to kill him, plain and simple. That she reminded him of Vander when they were young was inevitable, he supposed. 

He was impressed with the big boy’s calm, and his physique. Claggor … the boy would probably grow larger and brawnier over the next year or two, and would be valuable to Vander. He didn’t seem to be as angry as the girl, but he looked unhappily grim, which might have been the same thing with someone of that sort.

The skinny boy, with eyebrows even more impressive than the older girl’s, had hair that apparently defied gravity. Silco thought for a moment; Mylo was that one’s name. He looked jittery and filled with fight-or-flight adrenaline, but he stayed still, and put both hands protectively on the shoulders of the smallest child there, blue-haired and slight to the point of being almost unhealthily stick-thin, as too many Zaunite children were.

That child … ah, right, Silco thought. That was the youngest, the pink-haired girl’s little sister. Powder; odd name, possibly a nickname. Deckard had only mentioned her in passing, when Silco insisted on full reports. Kid’s a sickly little scaredy-cat; dunno why Vi hauls her along, since I hear she manages to foul up a lot of their plans. Pays to be the head kick’s sister, I guess. 

Silco wasn’t at all sure of Deckard’s assessment. This child — truly a child, good lord, how small had she been when Vander plucked her from the Bridge Massacre — wasn’t cowardly in the least, not if she was judged by what she’d done. She’d been in the process of climbing the cannery wall, armed with something she must have thought could help her siblings, when she fell. Silco suspected she’d known there would be a battle, and she was trying to join it. 

What had she carried that she thought might help save Vander, Silco wondered. That bore consideration — 

“You should leave us alone.”

Silco couldn’t help it, he reared back just a little at the tiny but determined voice. Yes, it had come from the little one. He was amused, especially since Vander looked one shade away from horrified. Let us see if she can follow up. “Why should I do that?”

“Silco —” Vander was warning him. He could be safely ignored. 

Silco spoke again. “Can you tell me why?”

The other youngsters seemed struck dumb. The skinny boy whispered in Powder’s ear, but she shook him off, and walked toward the booth, evading Vi, who had moved to stop her. Silco noted that the little girl was very slightly unsteady on her feet, presumably a result of whatever injury she’d sustained in her fall. She compensated for it well, and he thought that she might beat it eventually. 

That was less important than what she might say to him when she arrived at the booth. He smiled a little, and shook his head slightly at Sevika, preventing her from damaging the child. 

Powder reached the booth. For some reason, Vander said nothing, clearly waiting, as Silco was, for whatever she might say. 

“Because you’re trying to bring that drug into The Lanes,” she said, peering directly into his face, almost inspecting it. “Vander says it’s poison, and that it kills people. I believe him.” 

Most people avoided looking directly at Silco, largely because his ruined eye was unnerving at best, and frightening at worst. Powder seemed instead to be fascinated by it. “But mostly because you tried to kill my family.

“You’re bigger than me. But you should stay away from The Lanes because I’ll get bigger. And I’m good with a gun.”

As she said it, Silco found himself faced with a small, implacable enemy with a flat, grey-eyed killer’s look, one who turned on her unsteady heel and walked back to her siblings, dismissing him with that move.

It shouldn’t have chilled him. It did. 

“Kids. Out. Now.” Vander jerked his head toward the back door through which they’d trooped. He didn’t expect them to obey, but they did, with a few backward glares in Silco’s direction.

Vander leaned back in the booth, at least as much as someone his size could. “I don’t have much more to say than what Powder said. I’d take her advice.”

It was Silco’s turn to laugh out loud. “Take advice from a prepubescent girl?”

“Powder never promises anything that she doesn’t intend to fulfill,” Vander said. 

“If you say so.”

If Vander wanted to say anything more about his youngest adoptive daughter and her implied threat, he didn’t reveal it. He looked at the door where his kids had exited, and sighed. “Back to business: I’ve told you what will continue to happen if you keep trying to sell Shimmer in The Lanes. 

“But you and I know you’d eventually be able to come at least part way in. Not soon, not even in the near future. But we’re not a big neighborhood, and I don’t have your well-trained thugs; just good friends. You’d eventually eat some section of The Lanes, and it would be hell to free that territory. We’d bloody your nose, but … I’m looking further into the future, and I’d rather not get into a war with you.

“So here’s my deal. I know what you think of the agreements I’ve had with Top Side, especially the Enforcers. I will end any formal agreements I had with Top Side police.”

Silco sneered. “I have their Sheriff in my pocket. I don’t need that kind of help.”

Vander ignored that (an ability to focus that a much younger Silco had admired and copied) and continued. “My people, the ones who work with me to keep The Lanes clean, they won’t venture into your territories to take down your pushers anymore.”

Silco sat up straighter. That was something he could use. Even outside The Lanes, Vander was respected, so when his people pursued members of Silco’s sales force out of The Lanes, people would stand aside and let Vander’s people attack them, sometimes to within an inch of their lives. Those attacks had been increasing lately; if Vander’s people decided Silco’s employees had done something particularly egregious in their eyes, they didn’t much care about the borders of The Lanes. 

“You’d tell them to stay in their lane?”

“I always hated your puns,” Vander said, even as one side of his mouth lifted unwillingly. “But yes. If — if — you tell your people to stay the hell out of The Lanes, we’ll hold off. As soon as your people leave The Lanes, they can come back to you unharmed; our people will stay on our side. 

“But your people have to leave with all their goods. Nothing, none of it, gets left in The Lanes. The deal is off if we find you’ve tried to sell or stash it anywhere here.

“I’ll personally end whoever thinks they can do that. And then you and I will have another talk.”

Sevika had finally had enough; she stood up and walked over to the booth. “Try it and see, Vander.”

Vander looked up at his former compatriot. He looked tired. “Sevika. Do you want to join us?”

The answer threw the big woman. “I —”

Now it was Silco’s turn to sigh. “Sit down, Sevika. We’re almost done here.” She glared at her boss, then at Vander, but acquiesced.  

The two men were silent for a long while. Then Vander spoke. “Are you willing to seal this the way we used to?”

Silco immediately knew what he meant. He held out a hand to Sevika. “Give me your knife.”

Vander looked at him and scowled; there were to have been no weapons at this meeting. But he held his tongue.

Sevika, too, knew what Vander’s request entailed. Even outside The Lanes, this kind of pact was binding for those in the Undercity. She handed him her belt knife without comment. 

Silco used it to slice into the heel of one hand. The shallow cut bled profusely. He handed the knife to Vander, who did the same thing. The two men clasped hands, allowing their blood to mix. They didn’t speak, but they did continue to look each other in the eye. Finally, Vander loosened his grip on Silco, and gave a satisfied nod. 

“That’ll do.”

“Here. Have a towel.”

Silco stifled a startled yelp at the sound of the girl’s voice. He also managed not to flinch as she pressed a clean bar towel into his hand. She handed a second one to Vander, whose raised eyebrow was the only hint that he, too, was surprised that Powder had managed to creep up on them unnoticed. 

“Thank you, Powder. How long have you been listening?”

“Long enough,” she said, sounding far older than she should have. “That’s a really big promise.”

“It is,” Vander said. He gazed at her momentarily before turning his attention back to Silco. “We’ll both keep it. After all, both of us have witnesses now. Sevika for Silco, here, and you for me.”

“He has two witnesses,” the girl said, pointing to Sevika’s lieutenant. “So do you. C’mon out, Ekko.”

The boy, his eyes huge in his dark face, must have been with Powder as long as she had been in the room. Silco recognized hatred when he saw it in someone’s eyes. He saw it in the boy’s. 

Powder put both her small hands on the table. She reached for Vander’s injured hand with one of hers, patting it gently. The other she used to tap at the blood that had pooled under his hand and now threatened to soak into the wood. When she lifted her index finger, it was red. “Hold out your hand.” It was not a request.

Silco, now totally bemused, did as she commanded. She took her other hand, and bit down hard on one of its brutally chewed nails, tearing the nail enough to start a tiny thread of blood around the cuticle. She brought that nail up to her lifted finger and rubbed her blood into Vander’s. Then she took the finger and rubbed it across Silco’s cut. 

“You and me and Vander. All our blood,” she said. “Now I’m part of your promise.

“And if you break it, remember that I’ll get bigger. And I’m good with a gun.”

Silco couldn’t help it; he grabbed the child’s hand. “My word is good.”

She nodded, satisfied, and he released her hand. 

Whatever else Vander was — Silco still believed that he had betrayed Zaun, still judged him for that — he appeared to have raised some remarkable children. Children who, like the Chem Barons, bore watching. 

“I believe we’re done here,” he said. “A good meeting.”

Vander, who had watched his daughter’s moves with observably nervous but silently cautious approval, nodded. “Yeah. Let’s see how things go from here.”

Silco knew how much Vander hated Shimmer. He didn’t blame the man; it was a necessary evil, but an evil nonetheless, even in the form his people would be taking, and certainly in its original strength. Vander had always wanted to root out things that hurt the Undercity. That he was agreeing to keep that fight within The Lanes was a bloodless victory, Silco thought. 

And perhaps, he thought irrationally, he could return to The Last Drop and speak again with the dangerous little blue-haired girl. 

When the war was won.

-30-