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When Jayce and Viktor decided to do free toy repairs for the children of Zaun, they’d tried to put some guidelines around it at first, just to keep things organized and feasible. Mechanical toys only. For kids up to age sixteen. Drop off by December 26th at the latest.
“Should we say one toy per person?” Jayce had asked when they were discussing and Viktor had given him one of those sad, tired looks he sometimes gave when Jayce said something that revealed the privilege of Piltover and said, “I do not think that will be necessary.”
Oh, Jayce had thought, his heart hurting for all the kids who perhaps only had one toy, and a broken one at that. He’d torn up the paper they were writing the rules onto after that, ready to take anything. He and Viktor had invented Hextech. Surely their engineering skills couldn’t be defeated by any child’s toy.
Pride, Heimendinger had once told Jayce, came so often before a fall.
“This is Bear-Bear,” the child says, introducing the toy before herself. “One of the alley cats got inside the house and chewed him up.”
“I see,” Jayce says, taking the dilapidated bear gently into his hands. One of the legs has been fully torn off, stuffing escaping from the opening. What he assumes were button eyes have disappeared, leaving only strands of thread behind, and there’s already a large blue patch over half the torso.
Jayce looks into the girl’s huge, hopeful eyes and he can’t bring himself to say he can’t fix it. He’ll learn to sew. He’ll scavenge buttons and fabric. It’ll be fine. “What’s your name?” he asks and then he carefully pins a tracking tag—Sasha, age 7—to the bear’s ear. “Come to the square on New Year to get him back, okay?”
Jayce brings the bear over to the table beside Viktor where they’re keeping all the yet to be fixed toys.
“It is not mechanical,” Viktor says after a brief glance. “You can fix it?”
Jayce looks from the stuffed bear’s missing leg to Viktor’s leg brace—the best he’s been able to manage so far with steel and brass and the Talis forge. He swallows hard. “I’ll fix it,” Jayce says, determined.
Sasha must have spread the word that soft toys can be fixed too because over the next six hours Jayce acquires three more bears and a stuffed bunny and an elephant and oh gods he’s in trouble.
“V, I need to go back to Piltover for some supplies,” Jayce says.
“Yes, go ahead. I am fine,” Viktor says, barely looking up from the train set he’s working on. Jayce drops a kiss on his head and goes.
Weaver Street is aptly named; a long row of shops that deal in all things textile. Jayce ducks into the Fit & Alter, the bell on the door announcing his entrance. “Hi,” Jayce says, to the girl behind the counter. “Is Eritha here?”
She points him into the back room and Jayce emerges into the din of dozens of sewing machines running at top speed. The women behind the machines glance up when the door opens and then back down at their work.
“Jayce Talis!” Eritha says, recognizing him. “I haven’t seen you here in a long time.”
Jayce smiles at her. Eritha had been the shop associate who let out the shoulders of Jayce’s Academy uniform year by year as he’d filled out. “It’s good to see you. I was wondering if I could ask a favor?”
“Sit down a minute. Let me just finish this seam and then we can chat.”
Jayce sits down on a pile of rolled material and watches Eritha’s hands smoothly turn the fabric, the needle on her machine blurring up-down up-down faster than he can see. When she finishes, she shakes out the completed piece, now clearly identifiable as a suit vest. Jayce feels like he should clap.
“Now, what kind of favor are you looking for, Mr. Man of Progress,” she asks.
Jayce pulls Bear-Bear out of his shoulder bag. “I need to fix this and a few others like it by New Year or I’ll be crushing the dreams of several children from Zaun. My partner Viktor and I are running a free toy repair shop for the holiday.”
Eritha considers the bear. “I can spare you some fabric from the scrap box and teach you some basic stitches. Would you fix something for Sam for me in exchange?”
“Of course!” Jayce says. They’d opened the free shop in Zaun because most people in Piltover could afford to take any broken toys to a regular shop, or buy something new entirely, but the sewing lines weren’t particularly well paid. “We’ll take anything your kids need fixed,” he adds because he’d seen another woman’s head come up in interest the row over.
Eritha nods. “Go two doors down and get some needles and thread. You’ll want buttons too. A bit of stuffing. Bring it all back here tomorrow with your projects around five. We can practice when shift is over.”
“Thank you,” Jayce says, smiling, and makes his way to the next shop.
-
“These are your supplies?” Viktor says with a laugh when Jayce spills his bounty on the table beside him: three spools of thread, a round dozen needles in a variety of sizes, six sets of buttons in metal and glass, and something like cotton that the shop assistant had called ‘batting’.
“I’ve got this, V,” Jayce says, confident. “What have you been working on?”
Viktor holds up a wooden cart that had been missing a wheel and spins the new metal one he’s replaced it with. “And I have finished the train. These,” he says, shaking his head as he motions to a green-cased cylinder and a purple and black ball the size of Jayce’s palm, “we should have gotten better specifications from the children. I do not know what they are meant to do.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Jayce promises. Mysterious toys haven’t been uncommon. It took them half the afternoon yesterday to repair what turned out to be a hoverboard and something that looked vaguely like the severed head of a bird which had made them both scream when Viktor fixed the circuit and it started talking.
“After supper perhaps,” Viktor agrees. “Annika,” he calls out to the front room. “Would you like to have supper with us?”
Annika slouches to the back of the shop. There’s always at least one child stationed near the door. Some kind of revolving lookout to make sure Jayce and Viktor don’t disappear with all their toys as far as Jayce can determine. Sometimes they come further back into the shop in groups to watch in fascination as Viktor makes the repairs. ‘Our future engineers,’ Viktor calls them.
“Can we go to Jericho’s stall?” Annika asks.
“Yes, we can,” Viktor says, levering himself off the stool with his cane and taking Jayce’s hand.
-
The green-cased cylinder turns out to be a music box, a tiny painted dancer rising when the top retracts. Jayce leaves Viktor to solve the mystery of why the tune won’t play and takes his box of stuffed toys back to the tailors.
Eritha clucks over the elephant missing an ear. “We’ll get her sorted.”
Jayce glances into the exchange box. It’s a miscellaneous assortment. A few spinning tops—popular and prone to breaking their points. A duck with a wind up handle sticking out of its back. A listing toy sailboat.
Two other women come over. One of them takes the rabbit with bits of wire poking out of its moldable ears and the other picks up a bear so well-loved its fabric has holes worn right through. “The girls want to help out too,” Eritha says. “I can teach you some stitching on this one.”
Jayce nods. He wants to fix the bear for Sasha himself.
“Pick out whatever fabric you want,” Eritha says, handing Jayce the scrap box. “Take more than you think you’ll need for screw ups.”
While Jayce sorts through the varieties of color and material, Eritha herself takes a scrap of grey corduroy and quickly fashions the elephant a new ear on her machine. Then she demonstrates how to thread a hand needle, do a repeating ladder stitch, and tie it off. Jayce draws each step carefully in his notebook.
“Buttons too, right?” Eritha asks and directs Jayce through how to sew one onto another bit of scrap. It comes out a bit loose but it’s attached and Jayce grins.
“Thank you,” he says, including the other two seamstresses in his gratitude. They’ve fixed the other two bears during his lesson. It’s just Bear-Bear left for him to repair. Jayce hefts the box of mechanical toys. “I’ll bring these back next week.”
-
New Year races toward them far too quickly.
By the last night Jayce and Viktor are running more on coffee and sweetmilk than they ever have for an approaching Hextech deadline. Jayce has melted and reshaped the points on the spinning tops and is frantically reattaching Bear-Bear’s new paisley-patterned leg for the seventh and hopefully final time, unsatisfied with the durability of his last six attempts. The needle feels clumsy in his large hands, nothing like a hammer.
“We should recruit whoever made this,” Viktor says, peering through a magnifying glass at the inner workings of a frozen-in-position metal monkey whose sniffling owner had claimed used to walk and clap its cymbals together. It’s got sharp-toothed faces and squiggles drawn all over the outer casing in neon blue and pink but the insides are more brilliant than anything Jayce has seen the engineering students at the Academy produce.
“Ha!” Viktor says in sudden exultation, snapping a pin into position. The monkey’s cymbals start to crash together, loud and discordant. “Oh dear,” Viktor says. “Perhaps Andrew’s mother will not thank me for fixing this.” He takes a scrap of fabric from Jayce’s work and wraps it around the cymbals to muffle them while he finds the off switch.
Jayce ties off his last stitch and tugs to test it.
“It looks perfectly adequate,” Viktor says, which might sting from anyone else but is genuine praise as far as he’s concerned. “Sasha will be very happy, Jayce. Please come to bed.” By which he means come collapse on the cot they’d wedged into the back of the workshop.
Jayce doesn’t need convincing. He snuggles down, wrapping himself around Viktor’s back, and drops immediately to sleep.
-
On New Year’s morning, Jayce kisses Viktor awake and hauls him, groaning, out of bed.
“It’s delivery day!” he says, packing up the last of the toys they finished overnight.
“Yes, yes, I am coming,” Viktor says, strapping on his leg brace and buttoning his vest closed.
Jayce and Viktor set up their table in the central square. There are other stalls there too for the holiday, selling food and drinks and fire-cracklers. The children of Zaun swarm Jayce and Viktor’s table immediately, shouting out, “Where’s mine? Where’s mine?”
“Ah!” Viktor says, thumping his cane against the table. “We will call your names please.” He lifts a toy boat out of one of the boxes, reading off the tag. “Boat for Michael.”
Michael pushes his way forward. “It will not sink anymore,” Viktor says, handing it to him. “And the propeller works again.”
Jayce calls out the train set and an airship model while Viktor digs through the box closest to him.
“I do not know what this is,” Viktor admits, “but it belongs to Mina.”
“It’s a fuzzby!” Mina says, offended, but not too offended to offer a, “Thanks!” as she runs off down the street.
People stop just to watch and Jayce pauses to gauge their mood. What Jayce has seen of Viktor’s reception in Zaun seems to be something between ‘defector who abandoned us’ and ‘local boy made good’. Jayce himself is tolerated, if not particularly welcome. But now people are smiling at them, or at the children at least, their happiness infectious. Jayce and Viktor are going to do something for all of Zaun this year, Jayce vows. The Atlas Gauntlets for the miners. Or the water filtration system for the river runoff now that he and Viktor have figured out how to use the clarity rune.
The boxes start to empty, the children trickling away to go play with their repaired toys. Jayce lifts the last box onto the table; the stuffed toys. He can see Sasha in the small knot of children left, bouncing eagerly on her toes.
Jayce pulls Bear-Bear out of the box. In the bright light of morning, Jayce thinks maybe he should have just let Eritha fix it. The bear looks far less polished than the other stuffed toys with their tiny stitching and color-matched thread. Jayce’s stitches are sturdy but they’re also large and jagged and purple. But there’s nothing for it now. “Bear-Bear for Sasha,” he calls and Sasha surges forward.
“Thank you!” Sasha sobs, taking the bear from Jayce and squeezing him tight. She opens one arm and grabs onto Jayce in a hug too. “Thank you, Mr. Jayce!”
Jayce can feel his own tears welling up. She’s so happy. He’s done that.
Sasha skips away and Jayce wills himself not to cry in front of a sizable crowd of Zaunites, who already consider him a ‘soft Piltie’.
Viktor is looking at him tenderly. “Wonderful work, Mr. Jayce,” he says, pulling Jayce into another hug and letting him wipe his eyes on his shoulder. He turns to press a kiss to Jayce’s neck before he lets him go.
“We should do this again next year,” Jayce says.
“Yes,” Viktor says, “we should.”