Chapter Text
The first time they met was on the east bank of the Serpentine River, north of the Howling Marsh but not far enough for the icy winds of Freljord to make their mark on the environment. It was warm here, and it smelled of spring pollen.
A dark-haired boy sat in the grass on the edge of the water, crude fishing rod in hand. He had been there all morning, stark still, frowning as though it were natural. A small pile of fish lay dead on his right hand side.
When the bushes rustled at the end of the clearing behind him, he turned instantly, gripping the dagger at his belt. But there was no threat. Just another boy who had fallen face-first out of his hiding place, and was sitting up to hold his head and grimace in pain.
After a time, he opened his eyes and scoffed, “What are you looking at?”
“Your oversized skull.”
“My mom said it means I’m smart.”
“She’s an idiot.”
He stood up and pointed an accusing finger. “You can’t say that about my mom!”
“I just did.”
For a moment it seemed like he wouldn’t do anything, just stand there huffing until his cheeks were red because either he didn’t have the guts or the wits to retaliate. Then he picked up a loose branch on the ground beside him and came charging forward.
The branch cracked against Darius’s upraised forearms and pushed him backwards into the water, but his assailant came right along with him, carried by the recklessness of his charge. The river was shallow and the current weak. When they had both made it back ashore, the dark-haired boy punched the other in the face, shouting, “The hell was that for!”
“I told you!”
“Get out of here or I’ll slice you to pieces!”
“You don’t scare me,” he said sternly, despite the dagger being brandished before him.
Darius didn’t want to slice anyone to pieces. He wanted his fishing rod not to be floating in pieces down the river, so he could bring home enough fish to last several days at least. And he wanted to know what kind of idiot would start a fight like that against a total stranger in a place like this.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Garen,” the boy responded proudly. “A warrior of Demacia!”
The other narrowed his eyes. “You’re scum.”
“Says the one threatening an unarmed man with a weapon.”
“Get out of here.”
“You can’t tell me what to do.”
Darius didn’t think he had ever met someone more idiotic, not to mention filled with false pride. This life wasn’t worth taking. He sheathed his dagger, walked to the shore, and began to string up the fish he’d caught, remarking, “Suit yourself.”
Garen was still sitting on the ground where he’d landed after the punch. He said, “The emblem on your pouch. It stands for Noxus. Isn’t that far away?”
“This is the only good place to fish.”
“Is the water in Noxus too dirty for fish to survive? I bet everyone pees in it.”
He ignored Garen, slung the fish over his shoulder, and walked. He was nine years old and Garen one year younger; they didn’t understand why they hated each other, only that they did. It would be a long time before the war propaganda began to make any sense, and even longer before they thought for themselves despite it. As was the universal flaw of custom.
The walk was long, and would have been impossible if not for the old man who drove his wagon up and down the westward road from Noxus each week, delivering supplies to a small village on the edge of the mountains. Darius had tried to steal a basket of fish one day and been surprised by the old man’s reflexes. Instead of chastising him, or worse, the old man had greeted him with understanding, and told him that nothing could beat the fresh fish of the Serpentine River; the fish on the wagon was often several days old, and questionable in origin.
Since then he had gone to the river once, maybe twice, a month. The wagon left Noxus before the sun rose and returned as it set. The old man spent several hours in the village visiting members of his family; during that time, Darius could jog to the river and fish.
It always unsettled him, leaving Draven alone for the full length of a day. The boy wasn’t afraid of anything - not of killing, or of death. This could be a good or bad thing depending on how you looked at it. He was always prepared. He was also reckless.
But he was the one who always told Darius to go, because he got tired of scraps, and Darius couldn’t say no when he imagined the smile on Draven’s face, watching fresh fish roast on the fire.
The imagined crackle of fire was interrupted by the crack of a tree branch overhead. There was a shout, a flurry of limbs in the corner of Darius’s eye, and then a splash. This was a different part of the river - a deeper part. Darius had relocated in the hopes of not running into the Demacian boy again, and here he was, smacking up water as he floated downstream, screaming that he couldn’t swim.
Darius watched with narrowed eyes until his very last chance to successfully intervene. Something willed his mind to quiet and his legs to move - the last part of him that was purely human and not Noxian, the same part of him that brought him to the river to fish for Draven, a part of him that was instinctive and not under his control.
The boy was about to disappear around the bend when Darius dropped his rod and sprinted until he was close enough to jump. The cold anger of the water wrapped around all his limbs at once, but he felt a panicked hand clutch his forearm and fought, and kicked, and clawed at the shore until he had dragged them both onto it. The wind bit their wet skin like crabclaws.
Darius was about to stand up and start yelling. The Demacian boy, on his hands and knees, looked up and in his eyes was all the intensity of the water smoothed into clear blue solace. The tides of his panicked heart threatened to spill out the corners onto his lashes. His lips curled into something frightened and ugly, and yet, out of them came a voice of pure sincerity and gratitude. "Oh, thank you! I thought I was gonna die!"
In the end, Darius wasn’t angry at all. He only pretended to be, as he looked to the side and spat, “Don’t be so stupid next time.”
“It’s because I was watching you!” Garen shouted, as though saying so helped the situation at all. “I wanted to ambush you, and I… I… You ended up saving me.”
“Like I said,” Darius muttered. “Don’t be stupid next time. I’d beat you even if you ambushed me. You’re clumsy and weak.”
“I want to be strong like you.”
“You’re not-”
“I want to save people too!”
The outburst shocked Darius into silence. Strength was not for saving people; it was for conquering them. He didn’t have the heart to break this truth to the boy beside him, who was gazing at him as though in some distant dream where he was a hero, too.
Pulling him out of the river had been a mistake, and yet… Darius had done it before he’d even realized what he was doing.
“We have to cross back over. Let’s walk upstream where the water is slower.”
“Okay,” Garen said, suddenly beaming. “You know, I always thought Noxians were bad people.”
Darius had nothing to say about this, at least not out loud. There were good Noxians and bad Noxians. The good ones were strong, and they brought order and glory to Noxus. The bad ones cowered under the wills of others, rotting into fear and frailty, offering nothing to the world except their witless and parasitic will to live.
He didn’t know anything about Demacians except that they fought against the ideals of Noxus, which had to mean that most of them were bad.
“But you’re not a bad person,” Garen proceeded, walking beside him. “You just seem angry.”
“I’m angry because it’s too cold to be falling in rivers now.” He crossed his arms, shivering, clutching the fabric of his soaked shirt. “And you wasted a lot of my time.”
“I won’t try to ambush you next time.”
“Don’t bother coming back here.”
“It’s not your river. I can come here if I want to.”
“Well then learn how to swim. I won’t jump in after you next time.”
Maybe it was true, and maybe not. But Darius knew one thing, and that was that he didn’t want to fall under the control of anything, not even his own instincts.
They had arrived at a shallower part of the stream which was broken by rocks in the middle. Darius began to walk across them. Garen stood perched on the shore, looking downwards with trepidation. His hesitation was understandable; he had almost drowned not minutes ago.
“Could you teach me?” he asked.
“To swim? Why would I waste my time on you?”
“Afterwards I’ll help you fish. We’ll catch twice as many and you can have them all.”
Two rods didn’t necessarily mean twice as many. Still, something made Darius want to accept - maybe the encouraging certainty in Garen’s voice, maybe the genuine smile that was sure to cross his face, even as he stood at the grassy brink of his fears. Those were two things that were rare to find in Noxus. People smiled sinister smiles and were only certain when they meant to sin.
“Fine,” Darius said, and even as he did he chastised himself for falling under the control of this boy’s unselfish demeanor. He wished he could take it back but he couldn’t. Garen hopped onto the first rock and kept going, smiling as though there had never been anything to fear.
The water was much nicer in the summer. They could sit on the shore and feel the sunlight dry their bare skin, the wet fabric of their shorts keeping just enough of them cool that they didn’t have to jump in again.
In the past two years they had run into each other six times. Garen knew how to swim now, at least well enough not to drown if he was washed downstream. Darius found himself feeling less empty riding back on the visits when Garen did happen to be there.
“Jarvan’s been talking about girls,” Garen said, in his sudden and unapologetic manner, which was loud enough to require warning but offered none. “He said he’ll have to marry and become king when he’s older. When he said he wasn’t interested, his dad made him kiss the serving girl and she ran away with her face all red. Do you think I’ll have to do that too?”
“You’re not royalty, are you?”
“No, but my family’s pretty important.”
“Then you shouldn’t have to.”
“If I do, I want to make someone’s face red too. I don’t want to trip over myself like I always do. So that’s why I was wondering-”
“Why does it matter to make someone’s face red?” Darius muttered, angry because the only type of red that mattered was blood. The ability to make someone’s face red with blood - to defend, to survive. He was envious of this carefree talk. He was envious of Garen’s happiness.
“I don’t know… It just seems nice.”
Darius grimaced.
“Maybe I could make your face red. Then you’d see what I mean!”
He was shocked into looking over and there Garen was with his infectious certainty, leaned on his arm as though ready to pounce. He was still young and innocent to the knowledge that girls were different from boys, which mattered, at least, in Demacian politics.
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean, I could…” He leaned forward and placed his hand on the shore in front of Darius’s crossed legs. The silt gave way under his fingers and he fell towards the water. Darius reached out to catch him - once again, that instinct he hadn’t learned to beat - but the silt seemed to have stopped sliding because they both stopped each other with their lips, still cold from the water.
Darius scrambled backwards, his fishing rod discarded and just barely hanging onto the shore.
“Your face is all red,” Garen stated matter-of-factly, satisfaction bleeding into his cocky voice; in their time apart he had gained the beginnings of a more mature, intelligent ego. “Why?”
“You don’t just-” Dirt scraped up into Darius’s fingernails. He was still finding his breath, still trying to figure out if he was mad or not. He thought he should have been. “Why did you do that?”
“I wanted to see if I could.”
The answer was too vague to offer any meaning. Darius found himself feeling resentful towards it anyways, and to avoid the issue he got up, retrieved his rod, and slumped back down upon the shore to toss his line out.
After several moments, Garen was still watching him, admiring the shades that tinted his normally colorless cheeks, the frown that creased his boyish lips. “Are you really so repulsed by me?”
The frown became more agitated. “You can’t just kiss someone,” Darius said, repressing the explanation he wanted to give, which was that nobody had kissed him since his mother, and that was a memory he wanted to bury more than anything else.
“I know that. I saw the serving girl crying the other day. The one Jarvan kissed.”
"Then why...?" Darius started, but when he looked over Garen had turned once more towards the shore, the confidence gone from his expression. His bright eyes and willing smile had darkened in the shadow of the trees.
"Nevermind."
There were three people who maintained a constant presence in Darius's life, constant meaning they appeared again and again, not necessarily often but always eventually, and had a significant influence on his thoughts and actions.
The first was Draven, who, of course, was bound to him by blood, but Darius liked to think that they had stayed together all these years for reasons beyond the coincidental claims of fate. You didn’t keep somebody around to split your meals unless they meant something to you. Draven wasn’t a responsibility; he was a warm body at Darius’s back on cold nights, a heart to confide in, a reassuring smile when hope was on the verge of disappearing. He was invaluable. He was a reason to live that could never be replaced.
He was a reason to live, but much more importantly than that, a reason to reach beyond the bare minimum which confined all living things. By himself, Darius was sure he would have the will to survive; that was instinct. It was Draven that led him to the basket of fish wedged in the center of the wagon when he could have snatched a loaf of bread easily off the edge. It was Draven's smile.
The brown-cloaked man at the wagon’s side, beard frazzled and face heavily freckled with age, had turned and caught Darius by the back of his shirt before he could make off with the basket. The old man should have been an easy victim - too frail to chase even if he did notice the theft as it happened - but Darius should have been astute enough to realize that the old man would never be able to keep a business in Noxus if that was the case.
“Judging by your condition, I’m sure you need that more than I do,” he had said, voice dark but unthreatening. In that moment Darius could have yanked himself away and run off. “But before you go, let me tell you there’s a river near the end of my trade route where you could fish all you want and have it fresh. I got those from the back-alley market. No telling where they came from or how long ago.”
Darius had yanked himself out of the old man’s grip, but not run away. His voice had come out quiet and trembling; this was the first time he’d been caught. “How far is it?”
“About four hours west. Come with me now and we’ll be back at sundown.”
“You don’t care?”
“It’s not like the horses’ll notice. You hardly weigh more than that basket you’re carrying.”
So he had settled himself in the back of the wagon, between the basket he’d tried to steal and a sack of potatoes that almost certainly weighed more than him, and watched the dark gates of Noxus fade behind the morning fog. Sometimes the old man hummed. Sometimes he talked, almost as though to himself, about market prices or relatives or the latest news. Sometimes he rode the whole way through in silence. He never asked Darius anything, but Darius got the feeling he was willing to listen if Darius ever did decide to talk.
One could say that their relationship was purely professional, because of how little they knew about each other, except that doing something for another without expecting anything in return was an inherently personal action. The old man must have understood something that other Noxians didn’t. Darius couldn’t figure out what that was, but he was glad to get on the wagon every other week and bring fresh fish back to his brother.
He had grown so comfortable that he often snoozed until the wagon came to a stop. Then he hopped off and started towards the river, which was a fairly quick jog through open fields. Soon trees rose up and a dozen rows within he would find the clearing.
A tall boy was dropping his bag near the shore. He turned when he heard Darius, and his blue eyes lit up, and his lips widened in a smile that was sure to be followed by some cocksure statement of greeting. His hair had grown out almost long enough to cover his eyes. He was fourteen now, and handsome, and Darius saw him as a boy of royal blood even though he wasn’t, because he was loud and fearless and he stood tall and spoke with a propriety and confidence unlike anything Darius had ever heard. He was not plagued by the characteristic awkwardness of his age, but instead boasted clear skin and boyish, enthusiastic beauty. Darius had not looked in a mirror recently enough to find out if the same could be said for himself, but now Garen's beaming presence made him wonder.
He was the third person who mattered and the last person who should have. A boy from Demacia who had stumbled upon Darius’s stretch of river all those years ago and never stopped coming. His influence shone through in the simple fact that Darius had come to expect him - maybe even to look forward to him.
“I’m glad you came,” Garen said. “I would have ended up with a pile of fish and nothing to do with it. You’ve got me into a habit that would feel wrong to break.”
“I come every other week, don’t I?”
“Sure. Mostly. ”
“You don’t owe me anything anymore. You have friends in Demacia you could be spending your time with.”
“I could be.” He threw his line in, and watched the movement under the water’s surface with increased intensity. “More fish will swim along here no matter how many you and I pluck out. People aren’t so replaceable.”
Darius glanced over with an expression half-critical of such a meaningless poetic cliche. The other half was revering of the same thing. It took courage to speak one’s thoughts so unapologetically, and Garen always did - or maybe it just took brash oblivion.
“Anyway,” Garen continued cheerfully, leaning back on one hand. “I had a rough morning and I find this is the only place I can get away and forget about all that.”
“Something happen?”
“I spoke to the Captain of the Vanguard, hoping I could gain favor with him for when I’m of age to enlist. He asked to spar with me. He told me I was clumsy and weak.” The look he shot proved that they both remembered when Darius was nine years old and made the same judgment. It failed to convey how Garen admired him for knowing something like that so young. He was not only strong, but his mind had advanced well beyond its years in both cleverness and fortitude.
“Don’t let it discourage you. Anyone can change.”
It was a rare instance of compassion from someone who had been taught by the streets of Noxus to care only for oneself, or die. Darius didn’t see it as compassion, only truth.
Nevertheless it drew Garen closer to him, in more ways than one; he had distributed most of his weight in Darius’s direction, fishing rod perched carelessly on the opposite knee, head tilted serenely against his shoulder as he gazed forward into the trees. “If anything, I’m more determined than ever.”
Then he looked over and all inner composure crumbled for a moment under the weight of his unwanted affection for this Noxian boy, this feeling he couldn’t shake - an odd mixture of reveration and foreboding - which had haunted him in both expected and unexpected places since he’d been saved from the river six years ago. Along the beach just outside the capital, the tides seemed to grasp at his ankles and only thin arms around his waist kept his feet on the sand. At the dinner table, there was a shadow in the corner, roasting fish on an invisible fire; the walls blurred from its heat. Under the covers of his bed, the changes of adolescence had him more and more restless, and vague images worked him up until he could sleep. All of them had two things in common: a flat chest, and lips cold from water. They were the only lips he had ever felt.
“Sometimes you look at me with these wide eyes, like you want something,” he observed, since Darius was looking at him too, and he’d seen that look before. It was normally directed towards him when he was talking, and he looked over not expecting to be jolted so suddenly out of his thoughts by those piercing pupils and their endless jade fortresses. Normally he was able to pretend he didn’t notice. Today - and all at once - he felt as restless as he did under the sheets, and those vague images were colored in with stark clarity, right here, right now. He wasn’t thinking so much about propriety, or consequences. He forgot the responsibility resting at his knee, let it fall to the ground as his lips found Darius’s cheek and his hand clutched at the fabric guarding Darius’s thigh. All this became much easier guided by hormones. He would reflect, much later on, that adolescence was something of a drug.
It affected them both, regardless of how beyond his years Darius was in thought, because now wasn’t a time for thinking. He turned his head and felt how warm the lips were this time. His hands grasped Garen’s shirt and face, messily, not heeding any details because the sensation of a kiss was enough to eclipse all else. He would not remember that the shirt was thick and hard to grasp, or that Garen’s skin was flushed to burning; he would only remember that they had kissed. Garen leaned too hard and fell on top of him before kissing him again. Clumsy, but not weak. Garen’s fingers bit into his shoulder, holding him to the ground.
When Garen paused for breath, he saw the pain tugging at the corner of Darius’s lips, as he asked, “You been holding this back or something?”
Garen moved his hand a couple inches over, to the ground, and hardly waited to reply before leaning in again. “Maybe.”
At the end of the day they had hardly fished at all. Every time they cast their lines out, they would catch each other’s glances and go at it all over again. When Darius got up and said he had to leave, Garen pressed him up against a tree and kissed him for another five minutes. He dug his nails into his palms as he was walking away to force himself not to look back, since he might never have left if he did.
On the wagon home, as he faded off the high, he stared at the two silver trout lining the bottom of the basket. His lips felt bruised. He thought to himself that they were bad news for each other. Now more than ever.