Chapter Text
The mines chewed people up.
They spat them out with ash in their lungs and acid in their joints, and if you didn’t die quick, you just started moving slower. Less. Until something broke.
Vander was new, full of piss and vinegar, already with blood on his knuckles from fights that didn’t matter, for people who wouldn’t remember. He didn’t expect much. Didn’t ask for anything.
The mines were a sentence, not a job.
Vander knew that much going in. Everyone did. But he also knew how to swing a pick, how to lift twice his weight, and how to keep his mouth shut when the older men barked orders. His mam had taught him that. Not with words, but with the weight of her hand on his shoulder the day he left, packed lunch in one hand, and that look in her eyes. The one that said, You come back. No matter how.
So Vander came back. Every day. Bruised, blistered, bone-weary.
They had put him on the heavy crew right away. Big lad, shoulders already broader than some of the older men’s. He could swing a breaker bar like it was nothing, break apart slag a like the mine owed him a favor.
That was where he first saw him.
A thin little scrap of a thing, no older than him. Maybe younger, maybe not. Covered in grime like the rock itself had tried to reclaim him. He was pushing a full tub down one of the crawlways - barely high enough to sit upright in - and Vander had almost missed him entirely.
Except for the eyes.
Sharp and green, fixed forward like he was dragging that load toward a noose.
He never looked up.
Did no t talk, either. Not even when someone barked at him to move faster. Not when someone else - one of the older men, bastard - cuffed him as they passed, just because they could.
Vander frowned. Did not say anything.
There were plenty like him down here. Half-feral, half-forgotten, doing the work no one else would fit into.
But Vander noticed the way the kid flinched when the foreman raised his voice. The way he never ate during break, just crouched near the pipes, arms around his knees, sharp shoulders hunched like he was waiting for something to hit.
And Vander… he could not help it.
One night, over dinner, he saved a thick slab of bread and a smear of salted lard from his own meal. Wrapped it in wax paper. Didn't tell Mam why.
The next day, he left it near the corner of the tunnel where the kid always sat.
Didn’t say anything.
Didn’t look at him.
But when he passed again two hours later, it was gone.
And the kid? Still hadn’t said a word. Just kept hauling his tubs through the dark, never meeting anyone’s eyes. But Vander could feel it, that gaze trained on him. Watching. Waiting.
The thing about the mines was: you stopped noticing the noise.
The clatter of pick on rock, the distant groan of shifting earth, the coughing, the shouting - it all faded into a constant hum in the back of Vander’s skull.
Days blurred into each other. His muscles thickened. His calluses toughened. And every night, he saved a little something from dinner.
Bread. A boiled egg. Once, half a bruised apple.
Always wrapped, always placed just off the crawlway at lunchtime. Never acknowledged.
Until one day the boy wasn’t gone when he passed back by.
He was waiting.
Not a kid, not really. Vander saw that now. Just small. Half-starved. Hollow-cheeked and jittery with the kind of alertness you only learned by necessity. He’d come halfway out of the crawlspace, crouched low, one hand braced like he’d bolt any second.
They locked eyes.
Green to blue. Wide. Startled.
Vander froze with the bundle still in hand. Didn’t speak. Didn’t step closer.
He just held it out, the wax paper parcel balanced on his palm.
The other boy hesitated. His gaze flicked from Vander’s face to the food, and then back again. His mouth twitched, like he might say something. Like he wanted to.
But no sound came out.
He looked at the food again.
Then he disappeared, as fast as he’d come, back into the dark.
Vander left the parcel where he always did, heart beating strangely in his throat.
Felicia found him not long after, when he was hammering slag loose from a busted pipe.
“You work like you’re angry at the rock,” she said, leaning against the tunnel wall like she owned it.
He blinked. Grinned. “Aren’t we supposed to?”
She laughed, loud and bright and entirely out of place down here. “Fair point. I’m Felicia.”
“Vander.”
“Figured. You’ve got the arms of a Vander.” She mimed flexing with a wink.
He chuckled and offered her his canteen. She took it without hesitation, swigged like she wasn’t afraid of swapping sweat with anyone, and handed it back.
Fast friends after that. Shift partners, sometimes.
Felicia was everything Vander was not. Loud, sharp-tongued, quick with a joke - but also tough as nails and stronger than she looked.
She caught him sneaking food more than once, raised a brow, and said nothing.
Until one day she whispered, while fixing his shoulder strap, “You feeding the rat boy again?”
“Don’t call him that,” Vander muttered, too quick.
Felicia just grinned.
The food kept disappearing.
The boy never spoke.
But sometimes he lingered just long enough for Vander to catch a glimpse. A shadow in the corner. The echo of footsteps vanishing before he could turn.
And once, just once, when Vander left a piece of dried fruit, he returned to find something else in its place.
A rusted gear, polished clean.
Worthless, really.
But Vander turned it over in his hand, and smiled. It was his, sure enough, one of the spare cogs from his belt latch. Had probably fallen when he placed the food. But now it was cleaned off, placed dead center on the wax paper like a message.
Vander tucked it into his pocket.
He’d keep it. For luck, he told himself. For the principle of it.
Felicia was like the sun if the sun wore steel-toed boots and bit back when you touched it.
She worked fast, laughed louder than anyone else in the shafts, and had an opinion on everything, especially things she wasn’t supposed to.
“They should pay us more,” she said one day while they were stacking fuse crates in the upper shaft. “We do all the hauling, all the blasting. Those rich folk in Piltover? Sitting pretty while we rot down here. Ain’t fair.”
Vander glanced at her sidelong. “You’re not worried someone’ll hear?”
She snorted. “Let them. If they throw me out, I’ll start charging for shoulder rubs. Make twice as much in a week.”
But the fire in her eyes wasn’t a joke.
She said things Vander had never thought about before. N ot because he was stupid, but because he was tired, like most people were. Too busy surviving to name the bars of the cage.
Made him look at the foremen with different eyes. At the coughs in the tunnels, the busted support struts, the kids too small for the gear they wore.
Even the boy, the not-quite-kid he was feeding.
“He ever talk yet?” she asked one day, plopping beside him during break. "Rat boy?"
He stiffened. “I said don’t call him that.”
“Alright, alright.” She raised both hands in mock surrender. “Didn’t know you were getting attached.”
He glared, but she just grinned. “Seriously, though. You ever think maybe he can’t talk? Wouldn’t be the first they dropped down here as a wee lad. Piltover plugs the holes in their pretty city with our bones, and we’re supposed to thank’em.”
Vander looked away, j aw tight. He hadn’t really thought about why the other boy didn’t speak, not past the immediate mystery of it. But now it sat heavy in his chest.
“Maybe,” he muttered.
Felicia watched him for a moment, thoughtful now instead of teasing.
“You’ve got a big heart, Vander,” she said, softer than usual. “Don’t let them crush it down here.”