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[ Look, she at least gives him five minutes before she blows his inbox up. But then: ]

You're imprinted with him as well, then?

[ This is a surprise, admittedly. Since Hugo doesn't know that they're from the same place, it just doesn't seem like Mel and Silco are people that would ever interact. ~~canon says he's right but~~ In fact, she seems like the sort of person that Silco would deeply dislike.

...But, then again. He knows well that there are appearances that you put on for others. He does it himself, and that appearance is also someone that Silco wouldn't like.

So, it's a bit more than just their shared "friend" that has him feeling a pang of camaraderie. ]

I am.

[ He doesn't send the sentence right away, since what comes after takes a little more of a pause. It's a lie, technically. It's also a deeply wrong way to think about the event, and he knows it, but. It's still what he feels. ]

He saved my life, more or less.

Are Mockingbirds always prone to singing to their own detriment?

[ well that confirms his guess that silco IS that paranoid ]

Hm? What ever do you mean~? Are you concerned about me, Mr. Silco?

Concerned that you decided to run your mouth, yes.

Having fun sharing with others who you imprinted with? Do you think it's gained you an advantage?

[ How curious. So it was under a kind of duress, the same as hers. That troubles her, in fact. Kaeya mentioned something similarly, about how it might follow how someone engages in relationships on their own. Hugo admitted he has difficulty with trust; so does she and so does Silco. So was this some kind of inevitability, that they would find these connections under the most extreme circumstances? ]

I'm more surprised to hear he saved anyone. But there is a great deal about him I do not know. My own situation was similar, though he did not save my life. It was something of the opposite, I suppose.

[ It's slim but possible he would've survived without her. And yet... ]

[ The fact that this is something Silco is paranoid about isn't a surprise. However, an advantage? Is that what Silco considers it? That's unexpected.

...But it also means he knows how to deal with this. Be the worst version of himself, the one that's cutthroat and manipulative. It's what he was raised to be, so it's always easy to step into that role. ]

In a manner of speaking, yes. But it's with her, not you. To be blunt about the matter, I don't expect you to offer the balms that come with imprinting. I'm not keen on letting my Soul run wild, considering its hungers, so I'll do whatever is necessary to keep it under control. In this case, it's expanding my network of other imprints. Our shared connection with you is an excellent starting point, since it seems to have been complicated in both cases. If you're worried about what she might say, then you need someone to overhear it, don't you? I know where my loyalties lie, Mr. Silco. Our dinner should be all the incriminating material you need to prove that.

[ How much of that is true? He's not even sure. Lying comes easy nowadays. ]

Well, the "more or less" is doing some admittedly very heavy lifting. Just so I don't explain anything you may already be aware of, are you familiar with the process of transformation for Spectrals? Yet, regardless, if your situation was the opposite... Thank you. We were chatting about what it might be like to lose an imprint, and my feelings about the man are already terribly complicated. If he actually died, it'd be all the worse. But I do respect him. That part is uncomplicated.

[ Oh. Oh. Poor Hugo. ]

I'm aware it involves dying. My condolences to you, truly. I was present not long before someone else went through their Spectral death, and someone I care for is not long for his own. It's a cruel thing.

[ And no one, no one, should need to endure it. It is one of those things that she will never forgive Patho-Gen for. ]

I only advise that you keep yourself safe. I can't say I don't respect Silco; I do, and I appreciate his perspective. But I know very little about him. As we've discussed, I am hesitant to trust most of anyone.

It is. It was just coincidence, really, but Silco was there when I finally died. I can hardly call death anything less than duress, right? And neither of us really meant to imprint upon each other. It just... happened, at least so far as I remember. So, if you have a friend that will also pass soon, my advice is to try and be there when it's time if you can. It's terrifying, honestly. But it's better to not experience it alone. That's where I'm grateful to Silco.

[ He's leaving out a lot of detail. Of course he is. He'll die again before he admits to anyone that it was so much worse tan this. That he let Silco drown him and that he was grateful for that. ]

But (ironically) trust me when I say that I'm certainly doing my best to be cautious around him. I don't know very much about him either, but I think it's perfectly obvious that he's a dangerous person. One that's sure to yell at me for obliquely admitting our connection, in fact! But it's also a good test to see just how meticulous [ translation: paranoid ] he is, I figured. It's a useful thing to know.

You revealed your name in the anonymous conversation. Do you think that wise?

I've offered. But the both of them are stubborn and closer with others. I've been on standby for the potential inevitability but it's a difficult thing, to know someone is dying and you can do nothing for them, kept at a distance.

[ She respects their wishes too much to refuse them. But it breaks her heart. She knows Eli had people with him. She doesn't know about Ace, and the thought that he might be alone because he fears showing such horror to people who care... ]

Well, wonder no more: he reached out to me. I'm not shocked; he's very cautious about himself. I don't blame him for it, either. We weren't being as cautious as we should have.

Silco is, unlike others, more dangerous because he is unknown and somewhat unpredictable. He's also less dangerous than Patho-Gen.

[ at this point he's starting to wonder... two out of three are just negging him so far damn ]

It's informative. It certainly tells me who's willing to dig through a thousand comments of inane bullshit to find something interesting~. But I didn't say anything I wouldn't normally. Perhaps I stated it more straightforwardly, but I don't trust anything "anonymous" if I don't fully understand the technology behind it.

Information can be powerful.

You told me to reach out to Spectrals. Here I am.

I understand the stubbornness. Honestly, I was being stubborn by denying it was happening at all, as if it wouldn't happen if I just didn't acknowledge it. So I'm glad that I had better luck than I had sense. I hope that's something they come around to as well. If you think it might help them to hear from someone who's already gone through it, you're welcome to pass my information along. I do feel a distinct kinship with my fellow Spectrals, since our process does feel... unique. Unfortunately.

[ It's even been another project that he's been mulling over to try and find all the other Spectrals and make sure they know what's coming. That they know the don't have to be alone. It's such a delicate and honestly vulnerable thing that he's hesitating beyond the one-on-one conversations, though. He does much better with procuring art than he does sentimentality. ]

Ah, but truly, speak of the devil, since he just sent me a message too. He's indeed unhappy, but it's to be expected. Oops~ [ he's NOT sorry ] ...Though. I'm curious of your opinion, since I asked him too, but I imagine your answer will be much more thoughtful. Why keep imprinting partners a secret? I'm not sure if it's something worthy of caution, but that's why I'm interested in the rationales.

Ha! That was you? How fortuitous, then.

[ He won't share that he had a guess that it was him. Genuinely, this is something he wants to help other Spectrals with, so it's easy to just set everything Else about their conversations aside. ]

I can teach you how to use the glamour if you want, yes. It doesn't take too long to get the hang of, but I did find it easier with instruction. Magic doesn't exactly come naturally to me. My world was too dull for that, apparently.

Loyalty.

That's a funny word, Hugo.

[ He'd once said somewhat recently, that he still believes in loyalty. How much did he actually believe in it? Silco is a story of contradictions, of opposites. He betrays the soul of his very people, the ones he claims to love so much by controlling them with ruthlessness and narcotics, forcing them to sickness and starvation, while Piltover does the same. He loves Zaun, he has a vision for Zaun. He wants it to thrive and be free; he wants it to follow his vision. He wants it to be powerful, and overtake Piltover — he wants it to be able to ignore it forever. He is a loyal man to his bones — he betrays his every principle for one thing, and one thing alone.

He wants to believe in loyalty.

He eyes it all with a suspiciousness that burns and sears, taints everything he touches. ]

Incriminating material we both have engaged in. Funny how these things cut both ways.

Do you remember when we talked about enemies, Hugo? Do you know anything about the person you're suggesting that you "watch"? What she represents?

Her privilege?

[ Hugo, he thinks, is not loyal to a person. (Hugo's flaw is similar to Silco's own, their sister and daughter the only thing they truly are loyal to.)

He thinks Hugo needs to be reminded of a cause. ]

[ He won't indulge the discussion on loyalty. He already knows that's something that won't go anywhere, because out of anything he's said, that's definitely the one that's most a lie. It's just that unbeknownst to him, Silco knows it, because they're the same.

More importantly, the possibility of using his silver tongue to talk his way out of this situation is getting tougher as Silco shares that implication. Do you know anything, he asks, and Hugo immediately types and then deletes an emphatic "no" and the beginnings of a "because you insisted on not telling me", but he thinks better of both.

He's leading up to something here.

He might as well let him. It's a better way for him to calm himself down or at least work himself up over something different. ]

Ah. She's one of your enemies from home, then?

[ "Then why did you imprint with her" also goes unsaid. ]

No. I don't, Silco. Enlighten me?

I can pass along your information. Thank you for the offer.

[ Whether they'll take it is another thing entirely. But it wouldn't hurt, would it? As for the rest, well, she's not shocked Silco's lashing out at both of them. On one hand, she certainly would feel irritable, even hurt, if she knew someone was speaking of her and calling her nasty. On the other hand, she knows what she is: a step above a monster, just gilded with the finest gold. ]

I can only speak for myself, though I imagine it might be true for him as well. An imprint, to me, is a vulnerability someone can exploit. To know the name of someone who has entrusted themselves to me means that someone could harm them to get to me. The imprint itself has softened me towards others and it is, frankly, a detriment.

[ She is weaker now and she knows it. If Silco sees it the same way, and she imagines he does, then for his business to be aired like that is just another way someone can slip past his armor to harm him. ]

Hugo, I have lost everyone who is dear to me. I've lost cousins and uncles to succession wars. I've lost my father, my only friend, and my brother. Everyone who has come close to me dies.

To tie oneself to me is as good as a death sentence.

[ And still she is too selfish to ask them to leave, to try to break the tether forcefully. Now that she's known the warmth of companionship, it's difficult to turn away from it — and she is cruel for it. ]

Edited 2025-10-03 02:46 (UTC)

[ HE WAS DYING AGAIN OK
he has to go back to jinx ]

Imagine two cities. One is in the remains of a bomb, the earth cracked, spanning downward. Natural resources are revealed, but mining and industry pollute the air, the earth, the water. The people mine it, they dig deeper. Trenchers, they are called. Fissure folk. They do not own the mines, they do not even own the land their own city is built on. Some from this city, when the bomb hit, moved to the island on the other side of the river. Two islands, linked by bridge. Isolated from anyone and anything else, except by boat.

The city on the island thrives. Calls itself progress. They were the wealthy of this Osha Va'Zaun, but as they looked over the remains of their past, they called themselves Piltover. They owned all of the land, so the rich lands on the other side of the river was Piltover as well, but they called it the Undercity instead. They mined, they built, for generations all that Piltover, the city of Progress could call their own, came from the undercity.

Do you know what happens, when the industry and mining seep into the ground? When it pools in the water? When they pump waste and dust and filth into the air? It becomes hostile. It becomes toxic. These trenchers, they are sick. Poor. Their only worth is to mine and work, toiling day in and day out, for the people who keep them stuck in the mire on the other side of the river.

They take our raw materials, they use them for their own inventions, and they call it... "progress". They use our bodies, our labor, and our pleasure houses, and then return to their families and full bellies, all the while calling us lesser.

They keep a council, to manage laws, and determine the fate of two separate cities. They do not give us a seat at that table. We tried, Hugo. I tried, when I was your age. The end result of that attempt, you felt once, as well. I was drowned in the river, and mutilated for the attempt.

And the head of that council? Who has all of the power?

That is Mel Medarda.

She is the one who turned her face away, ignored us. Pretended that we were merely unruly criminals, and allowed deals to happen, as long as the city she considered hers was quiet and crime free. What did it matter if the trenchers starved? We were only criminals, after all. They have never had a care for us. And yes, in my desperation, I became that which now frightens them. You know what it is, to have to become the monster they always saw you as.

I did that. We did that. Because what other choice did we have?

Edited (oops icon) 2025-10-03 03:53 (UTC)

[ That… is a lot of text. Especially as a text. Before he gets to actually reading it, Hugo’s impulse is that he should really toss in a comment about texting etiquette, since multiple screens worth of text really isn’t it!

But as always seems to be the case, Silco’s words are more compelling than that. It’s impressive, honestly. Silco has a talent for telling a story that’s almost frightening. Hugo can see the dangerous sort of man that he is, and he’s almost glad that Silco is a nasty fellow, as he and Mel had put it. If he had enough charisma to play nice, well…

The thought drifts away as he’s drawn into the story, and his brow furrows further as he reads. The geography may be different, but the human misery here… That’s familiar. He does know what happens when wealth and industry stake their claim no matter the human cost. How many neighborhoods have been swallowed up and then TOPS sends in people like vultures to pick at the remains? How many poor live on the edge of a Hollow and pray that it doesn’t expand, since it’s just the easiest way to go mine the valuable materials inside them?

He's seen the human cost more than he thinks Silco expects of him. Ever since he’d started venturing into the Hollows himself, he saw death. Just about every excursion meant a corpse. A lost miner, a Hollow Raider that ran out of anti-Corruption medicine. They were luckier. It was just as frequent to find someone with Ether crystals jutting out of their skin as they took their last breaths. Hugo always stayed to hold their hand. No one should have to die alone. Or he saw the last look of humanity in their eyes before they became an Ethereal. A quick death is kind.

Naturally, he applies this story to what he knows. It’s easy to map. It’s almost one-to-one, which unsettles Hugo just a little every time. Silco and his world are such a dark mirror of his own that… ]

I know you won’t accept it, because I certainly wouldn’t either if our situations were reversed, but. I’ll say it anyways. [ because he’s the one that went to therapy ] You have my sympathies, Silco. I’m sorry that the more diplomatic plan didn’t work out. And that it was as much of a betrayal as my first failure, if I understood those feelings correctly.

[ Silco might not accept it, but he still wants to say it. There’s something to be mourned there, both personally and for the goals themselves. And, yet. ]

I understand her position. Your council would be called TOPS in my world, but it holds the same cruel disregard for everything but profit. It’s the sort my birth family held. It’s what I was raised to be until I saw it for the evil it was and threw it all away.

[ And, honestly? He has to wonder if she would have wanted to as well, considering their first conversation and what he’s learning simultaneously. He doesn’t think Silco would respect the sheer brutality that exists even for those in power, and he can’t blame him. What would their personal hells mean in the face of countless people who die just to extract metal from an abyss? ]

Can I ask, then. What do you intend to do about her now? Here, where she doesn’t have her council? Do you feel the same way?

Well, first I have to say thank you. It’s a far better answer indeed.

[ From their very first conversation about art of all things, he’d related to how they talked about family. Knowing the less polite strokes of it now… ]

And second, that I’m sorry. Both that it led to bringing this up, since I can’t imagine it’s pleasant, and for your losses. When we first spoke about family, I thought there were shades of it that were familiar, but it’s sad to know that it’s the brutality.

[ There’s a little of a pause before the next message, because he’s torn. What a strange little trio they are, he’s realizing, and it’s unexpected. Both of them manage to speak to things that Hugo normally keeps under tight control, so it’s the same as talking to Silco. He has to decide whether to be honest. His impulse is always to tell a more pleasant lie, and it’s only worse since his Soul has gotten stronger. ]

My family worked similarly, but I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have any fondness for them, since it was all ruthless games of succession, but I was just a whetstone for it because I’m a bastard. So, when there was an opportunity, they murdered the only person who was dear to me when I was very young.

[ A mostly truth, he decides. She doesn’t need the details that would make his heart pound if it were still capable. That they tried to scapegoat him for it. That he was praised for it. ]

So, I do understand how you feel. I feel the same way about being close to others, really. It’s a feeling I’ve worked on over the years, but it’s still never fully gone away.

[ Notably, he doesn’t mention his own opinions on the imprints. His own opinion is callous, and he knows it, but when it’s placed beside her much kinder rationale? He feels worse about it. If he can avoid having to explain it, he will. ]

You're right, I have no interest in sympathy.

[ An eye closes. He doesn't get into it. Again. How many times has he already said to others, how sympathy, kindness, these are all impulses to make the other person feel better. "Sorry" is a balm that fades within minutes. He wants change. He wants something different.

Sorry is what topsiders say when they drift down to the undercity, before they go back to warm homes and full bellies.

Silco doesn't want it, because it isn't anything. This is where they differ, his own personal dark abyss the thing that swallows him. It already did, and now it's spit him out like he's a sharp barb ready to latch onto the world and make it all suffer for what it did. ]

I do not trust her, but she is a capable speaker. A politician holds some measure of influence, even in a foreign land, as I am sure that you have picked up on.

She also feels "guilt". What measure, and how genuine it is, remains to be seen. She looked away for over a decade, until something happened that forced her to confront our existence.

[ His daughter. His perfect, brave, violent daughter. She would take up the mantle, she would do it. She was his daughter. She'd blown them up. She used the weapon.

He's so, incredibly proud.

He wants to hold her, and tell her she did good.

He has to go back. ]

This is a careful structure. I intend to use her. Just as she, I am sure, intends to use me. Perhaps, eventually, we will see who wins out, when she inevitably betrays me.

[ Interestingly, he does not say himself. Silco will hold to his deals. The letter of it. He will worm his way around, but he will hold to it ]

[ ...Huh. It's uncanny, then. In all fairness, she is also a bastard, born from her mother's affair with someone she has never met (or so she believes). She doesn't know her father's name or his voice, and while she has ever had Azizi to treat her as a daughter — even to the extent that she would never guess her own origins — the reality still sticks in her ribs sometimes. It's a refrain she'll keep for another time. Hugo's story is more important, but she resonates with it.

Ruthlessness. To be a whetstone, to be the carving point. She understands it. And now she starts to see a different sort of tangled web. Does Silco understand he's imprinted on two people who have walked parallel paths at one point? He'd likely detest the thought. ]

You understand it better than others do. I have no love of violence and I have been away from what little is left of my family for many years now. It shapes me, still, both the bloodshed and the tangled knot of blood ties. And so it makes trusting others even more difficult. I've never been close to others, not even my peers.

[ She had Elora, of course. But their dynamic was different. She was friend and assistant, and she, too, paid a price. The first person to look past her jagged edges and the cold stone of her heart is still here but vulnerable, and she has already had a brush with losing him. ]

I have to fight often to allow myself to trust the few I do. It is not a thing I can promise every day, though I work on it. So I understand.

If you have difficulties with Silco, or if you are concerned about retaliation, I can help you. I am not suggesting we hurt him, only that I have seen what he and his are capable of, and I wish only to prevent further pain. Silco is a man who is inventive, perceptive, and cunning — and I mean that in the kindest way I can.

[ For all that she still despises what he's done, what his cohorts have done. She can never forgive the blatant murder of her colleagues...even if it was deserved. But for him to endanger Viktor and Jayce? That had never been deserved, and she will stand by it. ]

We have enough agony in this forsaken place. We do not need more.

Edited 2025-10-03 14:06 (UTC)

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