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His words are cold water on her senses, startling her awake. She’d almost prefer the emptiness.
It’s bad in the beginning because Ekko tries to make her sleep, but the blankets are for Isha and she doesn’t want to say her name aloud for fear of seeing her and her big eyes watching her from the corner of her eye. No one’s talking anymore, not Mylo or Claggor or even Silco, who’s decided to slink back into the shadows after saying his piece, but now she would prefer it if they talk because this silence is too much like Isha’s silence: expectant, like she’s only hiding behind a corner lying in wait with her lopsided hat and gap-toothed grin and—
(twice from jumping, far more times from the Chompers he just can’t seem to get away from her no matter what he tries—)
Time passes funny for a while. Ekko comes in and out—lights the whole place up, nearly blinds her. He lights candles and plugs in the lamps and makes her drink water. He sticks around like a migraine with his coaxing voice and worried eyes and he pisses her off with how obvious he gets without his mask and modulator.
She catches him looking at all of the paint on the ground, of that awful imitation monkey Isha drew that looks nothing like hers at all, all wonky and all her own, of their doodles of them dancing together. She breaks the silence then, her voice cracking on a harsh: “what are you looking at?”
(“these drawings. they’re not like yours. who drew them?”)
“Nothing,” he says, like a liar. “It’s just—” he scratches the back of his head. “I was just thinking how some things haven’t changed.”
“You got that right,” she mutters, because she’s still Jinx and everyone is dead, from the tallest to the shortest. “Nothing’s changed.”
He winces at that, and she goes back to dangling her legs off the edge, looking longingly down into the depths.
“Mind if I change somethin’ real quick?” he asks, and Jinx doesn’t lift her gaze from the darkness.
“Be my guest.”
(once she falls so silently that he only realizes she’s gone because the fan wing has tipped from the sudden lack of weight, and even then he’s nearly too late—)
The hiss of spray cans begins to fill the silence afterwards. Ekko uses all the colors she doesn’t really touch like greens and browns and sunshiney yellows. He draws carefully, coalesces swirling, relaxed shapes into each other until they complete faces, smiles, bright eyes full of hope. She recognizes some of the faces he draws—there’s one rather doggish looking boy that Ekko paints in hues of soft cloudy gray who’s sporting a crazy mohawk that she remembers whiffing with her minigun once.
Watching him paint dead people upsets her stomach.
“It’s cuz you’re not eating enough,” Ekko comments fretfully after she finishes dry-heaving. She curls her lip a little at his mother-hen tone, but he unslings the weird little container from his shoulders and holds it out to her.
“Watch this for me, will ya?” He gives it to her gently, like he’s handing her a newborn. “I’m getting us something to eat.”
(he does it despite the risk because her eyes aren’t quite so lightless when they watch Powder’s monkeys spin)
Ekko gets take-out from Jericho. He remembers her favorite order and she eats a little, then more. They crack bones and drip sauce together and her stomach stops its cramping.
Gravy spatters on the metal of the turbine like rain on glass. She drags her finger through the mess and draws a smiley face. It matches Isha’s old hair, the color, so Jinx adds a round brimmed hat out of habit and is hit by a sudden wave of clenching grief so intense she feels like puking again. But she keeps it down and makes a chokey sort of noise that brings Ekko’s eyes back up to hers again.
Worried, big eyes. Brown and soft like healthy soil, not the gray stuff down here. Jinx wonders if they’d be the same color if he dies. She’s so sickened by the idea that she snaps.
“Why are you here?” she hisses. “Don’t tell me you fell for that whole hero of Zaun crap like everyone else.”
Ekko blinks. “I actually kind of missed that—”
“Bullhockey,” Jinx scoffs. “You knew. Everyone knew. The Boy Savior goes AWOL one day and suddenly I’m the next best option like I haven’t screwed them all over to begin with. I bet you were mad when you found out. The Jinx taking all the credit for what you got done in the first place!”
A very complicated expression passes over Ekko’s face. “I didn’t think that. I don’t think that.”
“Nah, I bet you did.” Jinx kicks her empty takeout box over the edge. She watches the sauce suspend prettily down all the way. “Bet you were hoppin’ mad about it, watching your precious Firelights drooling over someone else.”
“People need someone to rally behind when they’re scared.” Ekko picks at what remains in his own box, draws an hourglass in red-hot sauce. “I’m just glad that they found a way forward without me there.”
“Of course that’s what you would say,” Jinx sneers, wiping her mouth. “Boy Savior.” She spits out a bone over the side of the turbine.
Ekko is quiet for a moment, and for a moment she hopes that she’s scared him off. But instead, he shoves the takeout boxes to the side and rests his funny little devices in his lap. His voice is gentle when he speaks up again. “Can I get you to, uh, come over here? For a second? Want to show you somethin’.”
It takes her a while to oblige. Vitriol is exhausting and she’s been tired for so long. But Ekko waits for her until she finally scoffs and drags herself over to plonk down next to him, humoring him for the nth time. Maybe he wouldn’t have got his claws in her so deep if she had just kicked him to the curb years ago. But she plays his games, entertains his ambushes and attacks, because fighting is contact, at least. It’s a promise of rematches, of revenge. No such thing as abandonment when there’s a score to settle.
“Wanna guess who made this with me?” Ekko tugs a starter cord very gently and the light inside twists and flows like water. Little mechanically monkeys clutching cymbals, familiar and unfamiliar all at once, spin until they appear to start making music, a rattling, whirring clank that doubles upon itself like water licking itself.
She tears her glance away. “One of your Firelight squirts?”
“Nope. You’re never gonna guess who.” Ekko’s voice is gently mirthful, teasing. She’s never heard him like this before. He had always sneered, or screamed, or ignored her taunts. This coaxing is different; it stirs a part of her that she thought had died long ago.
“A Piltie.”
“Nuh-uh.”
Her voice comes out small. “Violet?”
Ekko smirks at her. “You think?”
Jinx just holds his gaze until his smile drops and his face turns earnest. “You did, actually.”
“Real funny.”
“I’m being serious,” Ekko says as sparks, materializing from nowhere, drift around them like lit rain. “A you from another universe. A—a Powder from a world where everyone’s—everyone’s alive.”
She cocks her head at him. “And here I thought I was the one who lost it.”
Ekko shrugs. “Genius and madness kinda go hand-in-hand, if you think about it.”
He tilts the machine towards her and she gazes at the monkey spinning merrily inside, clanking their silent cymbals and rattling from side to side. “We made it from Hexcore shards. Together.”
His voice lingers on that last word, slow and careful, before he picks right back up. “You were bright, innovative…electric. You came up with…with these ideas that I would’ve never thought of on my own. You were Powder there. You were the best version of yourself I had ever seen. I thought I was dreaming when I first landed there; thought that I went off the deep end.”
Jinx stares at him.
“In that universe, you’re brilliant.” Ekko runs his head through his locs, a laugh choking through his words. “I guess you’re brilliant no matter where we end up.”
“Shut up.” The words leave her mouth before she has time to stop them. “Stop it. What are you doing?” Her voice is confused, frantic. “Why are you like this?”
He blinks. “Like what?”
“All nice, like you care, all of a sudden,” Jinx cries. “Few months ago we were beating each other up. I killed your pretty fireflies. I blew you up. Why are you saying all this crap? Why are you still here?”
“Because I do care,” Ekko emphasizes, and her heart clenches because that expression makes him look unexpectedly boyish, like the Ekko she used to run the sumps with, “Vi’s not the only person who cares for you, Jinx.”
There’s a beat of silence.
“But you like Powder,” Jinx says. “You hate me.”
Again, that complicated expression on his face.
“I don’t hate you,” Ekko says slowly, like he’s saying it aloud for the first time. “I don’t think so.”
Jinx scoffs. “I don’t believe you.”
She kicks each leftover box into the abyss and stomps over to the furthest edge of the turbine fan from him as she can. But Jericho’s food is working its usual magic and she feels the edge of sleep creeping into her periphery like a snake. She curls up on her side, letting her arm dangle over free space. Ekko hovers for a moment before she feels the wing creak as he gets to his feet, cleans up what’s left of their mess. The white noise of his fussing lulls her to sleep despite herself, and when she wakes up she finds Isha’s blanket draped over her shoulders.
Ekko doesn’t shut up after that. He runs his mouth like his Firelights, quick and precise but persistent. He draws up rough diagrams of the Hexgate and the surrounding infrastructure and some approximations of the invading Noxian army, talking strategy like she’s somehow agreed to be an active participant in his craziness.
She hides under Isha’s blanket and refuses to come out. He doesn’t push her and just talks, vocalizing plans and inventions and ideas until she begins to listen. Somewhere along the way the listening becomes a need because Ekko didn’t used to talk, not this much for so long. Jinx knows what sound he makes when she claws at his face, how he grunts when she lands a hit on his shoulder, what scream comes from his heart when she shoots a Firelight in theirs. She knows them as well as breathing. But she’s never heard his voice, this soft older one, like this: falling and rising over the syllables of words like “combiner” “thrusters” and “nozzle,” humming, musing, pondering. His voice free of pain or anger or adrenaline-filled tautness, a cadence nearly unbearable in its sweetness. It’s what eventually coaxes her out from underneath this makeshift mourning shroud, catching every word that drips from his mouth until she’s responding to his questions, his half-finished musings.
“We just need a height advantage,” Ekko says, drawing an arrow over rectangles meant to resemble towers. “They have airships near the docks, so we can come up from below the fissures, keep to the alleys until they’re distracted by the enforcers.”
“An airship,” Jinx mutters. “You can go up and down without making noise.”
Ekko glances over at her, a startled smile crossing his face whip-quick.
“An air—an airship. That’s perfect, P—Jinx. That’s perfect.”
Jinx scoffs and retreats back under Isha’s blanket, but the idea begins spinning in her brain like that creepy pulsing star inside of Ekko’s container until she plucks it from her brain and begin scraping a rough little schematic with her nails on the floor of the turbine, luxuriating in the claws-on-chalkboard sound until a gloved hand pokes a chalk underneath the hem of the blanket.
Ekko keeps talking, a steady stream of one-sided conversation. It becomes less one-sided when she corrects him on the placement of longitudinal girders, then he counters by telling her where she can put her longitudinal girders, as if by instinct. He freezes as the words leave his mouth, but she snorts, suddenly, a closed-mouth exhalation of breath, and surprises herself. And Ekko too, judging by how his eyes go wide and then soft in a way that feels old-familiar.
She hates how quickly he’s growing on her. She hates how she’s craving that smile again, that feeling of laughing unexpectedly even when part of her is still cracked open and bleeding all over where Isha left her handprints. She hates how she’s forgetting, how much she’s remembering.
When the airship becomes too detailed for chalk, Ekko disappears and comes back with a whole roll of schematic paper. They spread it out between the two of them and the design comes to life. Haltingly, because they bicker over every step until Jinx kicks her feet in a tantrum and Ekko gnaws his lips and furrows his brow.
“It’s the lack of central support,” he finally realizes one night, when they’re both half-delirious from lack of sleep and lying on their backs, staring up into the dimly-lit ceiling of the underground. “The whole thing will collapse without it.”
“It has to be big,” Jinx mumbles. “Big, huge, like as big as a building—”
She trails off, staring up at the trunk of her turbine. Isha sits in the upper rafters and spreads her arms out to the side, flapping them emphatically.
“Oh,” Jinx mutters, her throat closing. “Oh, okay. So that’s how it’s gonna be.”
“Jinx?” Ekko says, confused, but his eyes follow hers and the breath he sucks in hisses around the cavern like a loose hose.
“Unscrewing this thing’s gonna be a nightmare,” Jinx giggles, suddenly ready to cry for some reason. “We need—we need to get supports, a whole rigging—”
“An engine, we need to make an engine, Jinx,” Ekko interrupts, his voice pitching high with excitement.
A blimp, like an airship. Jinx clutches at her chest, at Isha’s blanket that doesn’t even smell like her now, and the tears finally come: big heaving sobs that feel as if they’re wrenching her ribs apart. She curls in on the blanket, holding it close and getting her tears and snot all over it and cries harder than she's cried in a long time. Ekko's gloved hand touches her shoulder as she sobs, a brush of stained leather against shivering skin, and that’s when she knows that she’s not going to see Isha for a long while yet.
The first breath after a lungful of water hurts like hell. Silco was right after all.
There are no more days now. There are plasma cutters and hammers and nails and engine parts and grease and a Hexcore engine and turbines and a rigid structure. Jinx cuts and sews and sleeps only when Ekko makes her. When she catches him sleeping, she paints his locs and drips paints on his pants until he wakes up speckled in pink and blue.
“Har har,” he says, rolling his eyes, but Jinx catches him touching the X’s and stars with something like sadness and she doesn’t paint any more after that.
It’s not as if everything’s better. She picks at her nails when she can’t sleep and cycles through those final moments with Isha over and over again. The happy memories are worse than the sad ones and she toys with the Chomper until Ekko has to step in again, prying it from her and folding her hands under his own until she stops shaking.
But there’s a little more light in this space now. Not Isha’s blinding wattage, her big coin eyes and toothy grin, but the bluish glow of Ekko’s Z-drive and the flash of his teeth when he says her name. “Jinx,” he calls her now, never Powder. She doesn’t know which she prefers.
When the central structure begins to come together, shit begins to go down. Ekko leaves one day for more parts and comes back with a spitting mad Sevika, who grips her in a sudden and unexpected one-armed hug and says “kid” into her hair, like she used to call Isha, and Jinx hates how often she’s crying now, how easy it is to cry with someone nearby after you’ve done it the first time.
The sentimentality doesn’t last because that’s not how it is between them. Sevika’s mad, as usual. Sevika’s mad because Piltover’s trying to conscript Zaunites into their cop-army to prepare for their invasion, she’s mad because The Undercity is falling to pieces because any remaining infrastructure in the Lanes left with Margo and Chross when they ran for the hills, and she’s mad because she can’t find it within herself to abandon even this crippled, doomed Zaun.
Once Sevika runs out of breath, Jinx tosses a screwdriver, the dented one she had stabbed in Silco’s desk, to her. Sevika catches it easily and stares down at it in recognition.
“You done jawin’ yet, Lefty?” Jinx says tiredly. “Or you want to stick this somewhere where it’ll really hurt the Pilties?”
Sevika narrows her eyes.
Ekko does most of the talking because he’s good at it. Convincing people. Sevika glowers down at him the entire time and Jinx can’t help but smirk a little because it’s such a funny picture, seeing Ekko without his Firelight mask confronting the woman whose life he’s ruined on multiple occasions. Sevika doesn’t give him a hard time though; she listens, interjects with occasional questions or clarifications, and eventually she stands up.
“It’s too big of a risk.” She grabs her lighter and turns to leave. “I’m not risking what little we have for a slipshod plan like that.”
“I’ll make you a new arm,” Jinx says suddenly, her voice hoarse from relative disuse. “Brander than new. Awesomer than awesome. It’ll make the last one look like a shitcan.”
She tilts her head back. “I’ll even get Ekko to help. How’s about that? Juicy enough to make your old fish bite?”
“We can give the Undercity a fighting chance when all this is over,” Ekko says. “A handhold.”
Sevika groans and shoves a hand through her hair. “I hate it when kids tell me what to do.”
“That’s Sevika for yes,” Jinx tells Ekko, and he tilts his head up in a grin.
It’s not camaraderie, but it’s a loosening of, something. It’s a dance, Ekko had called it, in a way that had intrigued her as much as it puzzled and pricked her, the way they move around each other now as they unscrew bolts and cut wires and saw through entire lengths of metal until the turbine begins to resemble a big, metal top like from some metalpocalyptic freak show: her touch, with his gentler, sweeter breath like the guardrails and warmer paint palettes stringing her madness together. Once they’ve got the majority of the frame assembled, Ekko scrounges up an inordinate length of stiff canvas, perfect for the blimp’s outer shell.
“Found it in one of Chross’ abandoned foundries,” he explains, spreading it onto the ground. “I know where we can get more dyes, too. Blue, you think?”
“Not blue,” Jinx says distantly, thinking of shining-coin eyes watching two crayoned beetles clack against each other. “Yellow.”
In the evenings, she builds Sevika her new arm. She refuses to return to the cordoned arcade after that horrible last time so Ekko sneaks back through the Undercity to get parts and when he returns, there’s a rather grim set to his jaw that’s enough of a clue that he’s figured out what had happened. But he doesn’t push her on it and just spreads the parts on the ground and they get to work, shoulder to shoulder until Sevika’s eyebrows raise when she slides on the completed, lighter piece: the closest to outright approval Jinx’s ever gotten from her.
The weapons are palate cleansers between airship construction. Pow Pow comes back to life with a brand new mug just fine, but Jinx wants something bigger than Fishbones, something mega ultra big. When she sets down the pieces that Vi’s ripped in half like some hunk of tender meat on the ground, Ekko whistles.
“You might need to start from scratch with that one.”
“Nuh-uh,” Jinx sings, shaking her head. “Honestly, the frame’s banged up, but this and this,” she points out the handle and the outer frame, “I designed so you can kind of just slide the energy source right here, easy-peasy. Everything else you can kind of just build right on top, here and here. Cooling system here, vents here, and boom!”
She mimes an explosion, all spittle and teeth. Jinx sticks the screwdriver behind her ear and contemplates the desiccated once-was Fishbones and his guts scattered on the ground, her mind whirring for appropriate parts, the toolage, what must come next. “I just need the friggin’ bits and we’re off to the races—”
Jinx looks up mid-sentence and reels to a stop when she sees the way Ekko’s staring at her.
She’d assume him to be fed up with her ramblings, or at least counter with some Boy-Savior namby-pambyness of his own like he’d been doing recently. But no; he’s gazing at her with soft eyes and parted lips and all of a sudden Jinx feels all weird inside, like, tingly and strange. It’s similar to the tinglies she gets with Isha but this feels different from that; warmer, less sweet. Hotter.
She snaps her fingers, two sharp clicks that echo in the space around them. “Hey. Get a grip, Little Man. We’re on the clock here.”
He shakes his head, scoffing, but it’s a soft, fond sound. “Sorry. You reminded me of her.”
“Of your made-up Powder?” Jinx doesn’t mean for her voice to come out so blasé but Ekko’s eyes narrow.
“She’s not made-up,” Ekko says in the same voice Mylo used to use when talking about sweethearts that don’t exist. Vi used to knuckle his head and call him a liar, but affectionately, and Jinx, Powder then, would mimic Vi’s tone, high-pitched and gleeful in the way siblings could be with each other. Liar, liar, liar.
Sweetheart. The term sticks in her head like a migraine and marries uncomfortably with the soft, strange expression on Ekko’s face. Jinx feels a sudden squeeze of something green and horrid and the words wrench themselves free before she can stop them:
“Is she pretty?”
Ekko’s mouth opens and closes like a fish. It would be funnier if her chest wasn't seizing. “What?”
“Is she pretty, your Powder?” Jinx’s voice comes out steady, a knife cutting away dead ends of heavy hair. “Pretty as a picture?”
Ekko stares at her, wide-eyed. With a few easy words, she’s done what years of bullets and fists and nails have never been able to do.
“I mean—” his voice comes out wobbly, then strengthens as his hands open and close around the handle of his hammer. “She’s you, just in another universe. It’s not like she looks super different from you.”
“That’s not an answer,” Jinx shoots back, but she feels her cheeks flush regardless. He’s making fun of her, he has to be; she’s caught glimpses of herself in the mirror and she looks just about as sick as she feels. Gaunt, dark circles, eyes like rotten fruit. Hair in tangled clumps that she hasn’t bothered washing in so long, not after she lopped it all off in that delirium after Isha and Vander—
“She’s pretty,” Ekko finally says, reflectively. And then leaves it at that.
Jinx’s lip curls. She likes pressing bruises, watching the purple turn thin and pale as pain lances up and down her nerve endings like electricity, shocking herself into an acerbic kind of mirth, and this almost feels the same. His current posture reminds her of wounded men who bow over themselves to protect the gaping hole gouging them out from the inside, those who favor the unbroken leg over the crooked one, people who hug themselves to protect that wet open eye weeping red.
His eyes are downcast, focused on weighing parts and pulling at stubborn wires, and they only realize she’s drifted closer when her breath warms his face. He glances up, startled, as she sweeps the white locs away from his eyes. She studies what dances inside and wonders what they’ve seen, those wide eyes whose light she used to have memorized like a song.
“Jinx?” Ekko chokes, and she startles away from him. “Wh—”
“Let’s go sump diving later,” Jinx says abruptly. She folds her legs beneath herself and plops back next to Fishbones, her fingers dancing over the familiar jagged edges of her poor toy’s corpse. “Like old times.”
It takes a while for him to regain his bearings. “Think you’ll find something?”
“You know what they say,” she hums. “One person's trash is another’s explosive personality.”
The sumps are a bust. Literally, some wackjob exploded all over the grounds and both of them, wearing filtration masks over their mouths, recoil at the smell despite themselves.
“Chross’ men,” Ekko says, his voice muffled as he uses his metal pipe to poke at a studded hat floating by. “That’s weird. I’ve never seen them this far down before.”
Jinx sweeps her gaze over the length of the sump. The empty oil drums and the corroded chassis of powered automobiles looming from the rainbow-slick lake have been there as long as she can remember, but the bodies floating on the surface are new, stinking fresh. The haze over the grounds isn't just from the gasses belching up from the sump.
“I bet a big bad wolf chased them here,” Jinx mumbles, her eyes flicking over the parallel claw marks festering on their backs, the heavy upturned divots in the rocky ground in the shape of monstrous feet. There’s a distinct odor of burned hair in the air, hanging like smoke.
Ekko shoves off from the edge of the sumps with a grunt. “Let’s go back. There’s not much to find here.”
“Wait,” Jinx says, grabbing his sleeve. There’s a gleam from the inner depths of the murk and as she squints, she makes out the pronged shape of an honest-to-goodness captain’s wheel poking out from where it’s embedded in the neon puddles of chemical waste. Immediately fireworks go off in her brain. “Hold on a sec.”
“What?” Ekko blinks as she presses their empty haversack into his arms and clicks her fingers over his shoulders. He grasps her meaning quicker than she gives him credit for and detaches the hoverboard from his back. “Wait, Jinx—”
“Just shut up and watch how it's done, Savior Boy,” Jinx drawls, cracking her knuckles before she slides the hoverboard down and leaps on top. It purrs to life beneath her and she digs her heel into the ignition. The board roars across the rainbow slick of the sumps, churning up corroded froth behind her as she speeds towards the jagged shape of the wheel where it’s belly up in the gunk.
“You have gloves, right?” Ekko hollers from shore, and Jinx just sneers at him before she reaches down, grasps the closest greasy spoke she can get her hands on, and tugs.
There’s an audible sucking noise as the wheel emerges from the chemical gloop, dripping with every single contagion known to man, but Jinx is cackling because it’s a perfect captain’s wheel, spoked and intact and everything. The air is wavering around it like it’s radioactive, and it probably is, but it’s perfect, perfect perfect for what she has in mind. She turns her ankle and the hoverboard responds like a dream, veering around and speeding back to shore as she clutches her find to her chest like it’s worth a thousand Piltie mansions.
Ekko looks a little green when she kicks his hoverboard back to him. “I’m hosing you down before we get back.”
“Boo,” Jinx pouts, but she can’t stop from grinning. It’s a faint thing, but Ekko’s eyes crinkle, and though she can’t see his lips behind his mask she can tell there’s a matching smile on his face.
When they pass the junkyard close to her hideout, Ekko slows his steps and looks meaningfully at one of the hanging hoses dangling like a dead snake off of the chain link fence. She scowls at him. “Don’t even think about it.”
“We don’t even know if the water’s still on,” Ekko says pleasantly, as if she’s just asked him for the time.
Jinx smells danger and begins to quicken her own pace. “Junkheads probably stripped it of parts already.”
Ekko rolls his shoulders. “Only one way to find out.”
Without warning, his hand shoots out and grabs her arm as she tries to bolt, but he’s gotten strong and no matter how much she screams, kicks, and bites, he pins her in place as he fumbles for the nearest nozzle, shaking the hose and squeezing the trigger at the ground a couple of times before water finally fizzes and gushes from the top. Like most water in the Undercity, what comes out is gray and filmy, but eventually it runs semi-clear and Ekko smirks as Jinx all but balks in horror.
“I’ll mess you up if you try that,” she hisses, and Ekko’s eyes widen teasingly behind his mask.
“You haven’t been doin’ that already?”
Stung, Jinx opens her mouth to cuss him out big time, but then he aims the nozzle straight at her and holds down the trigger. The water is ice-cold and she appropriately screams and sputters, flapping her hands in an effort to bat the water away like she’s eight again as he just holds her in place, moving the nozzle from the crown of her head to her arms and her body and just about everywhere else until the worst of the slick runs in grimy rivulets off her body.
“You’re getting my clothes wet!” Jinx shrieks, groaning in disgust as her boots and socks puff up with water, and she swears she hears him chuckle.
“Trust me, they need it,” Ekko shouts back.
“For the love of—” Jinx shakes him viciously free and works off her top with another curse, tossing the ruined thing to the side as she begins wriggling off her bottoms. “You’re such an ass.”
She pauses. The water’s dwindled to a small stream now and Ekko has frozen in place like some agape statue. Jinx glares at him, her teeth chattering gently. “What?”
He hurriedly spins around, facing the length of chain link fencing tilting away from the junkyard. “I-I’m sorry. I’ll um, let you get dressed.”
Jinx glances down at herself. Oh, whoops. The girls are out there for sure. She glances behind her to find Ekko still stubbornly facing the fence and she can’t help but giggle. “Ohh. Little Man’s a gentleman now?”
Ekko ducks his head. “Just—put something back on, please?”
“Fine,” Jinx sighs, searching for her discarded top, only to find it covered in gunk from where she’s tossed it onto the ground. “Aww. I liked that shirt.”
She’s great at improvising, though, so she unfastens her belt and shimmies it up just in time for Ekko to peek cautiously back around. He has the nerve to recoil at her awesome fashion sense. “Jinx!”
“What?” Jinx complains as he curses under his breath and hurriedly begins shucking his coat. “It’s not like they’re gonna explode! Though could you imagine if they did? Oh, man, I could get a kick outta that…”
“Just hold still,” he begs, and Jinx blinks as he settles the heavy warmth of his big jacket around her shoulders, clasping the top so that her head peeks through like a turtle. His eyes don’t quite meet hers, but she takes the opportunity to get a good long look at him.
“You’re shy,” Jinx comments, and he doesn’t flush, necessarily, but instead she feels the heat coming off of him ramp up and she can’t help but smirk as he grits out “let’s go” and all but hauls her back to the hideout.
Jinx studies his back as they walk. His neck is very close, and without that big upturned collar shielding it she can see the cords of it working, bunching and unbunching whenever he turns his head. She wonders what she’ll feel if she were to place two of her fingers against his pulse. Would it jump under her palm like she almost did or would it walk with slow intent, like he did to her?
When he’s not looking, she presses her lips to the collar of his jacket, smearing enough of her lipstick around so that it’ll be a bitch to clean later. Maybe he’ll get mad and she’ll be on familiar ground again instead of this tentative, sump lake of murky confusion and intent that she’s dancing over on half-sunken oil barrels.
“I got the prize, in the end,” Jinx mutters as she glances at the captain’s wheel knocking against her shins every time she takes a step.
Ekko glances back at her, and she just smiles back at him, making a big show of cuddling into his jacket. He scoffs and looks away, and it’s nice to see that the little boy who always blustered and fumbled when he got nervous was still in there, underneath all that get-up.
Can the same be said for little girls?
“Hey,” Ekko says after a while. “I want to bring you someplace.”
“Move fast, don’t ya?” Jinx mutters, and he gives her an exasperated look.
“Not like that.” He tilts his head up to look at the murky sky, where the stars would be. “A daytrip, kind of.”
“Are you kidnapping me?” Jinx asks.
Ekko makes an incredulous sound. “You think I’m going to ask your permission to kidnap you?”
“I dunno. I never know what you’re gonna do now. You used to be easy to figure out.” She rubs her shoulder, turning her chin away. “Now you’re…you’re nice. It’s weird.”
Ekko’s eyes soften. “You’re my friend.”
Sweetheart, girlfriend, Mylo sings. Hearts dance in the periphery of her vision, colored green and black and pink, and Jinx scowls.
“Where are we going?” She demands, and he shakes his head.
“It’s a surprise.” Ekko cranes his head to glance around them, though there’s barely anyone on this abandoned road anyway. “Tomorrow morning, then.”
She tilts her head at him. The mask covers the more telling of his features, and what remains is neutral, passive. She scowls at how quickly he can school his emotions, how swiftly he goes from Little Man to the leader of the Firelights, masked, cloaked, anonymous.
(He never was, though, was he? She knew him from the moment he put on that mask, Benzo’s old mask, and wore it into battle. Perhaps even then he was arching his neck out to her, waiting for her to paint a pretty red smile where everyone can see. A candy heart note. URS printed in sugar.)
“Tomorrow,” Jinx echoes, with great suspicion.
Years ago, Silco had tasked Sevika with quietly subduing what he called “upstarts.” It was a term broad enough to encompass anyone from Piltover, like undercover Enforcers, to any rebellious Chembarons champing at the bit for a nonconsensual promotion. Sevika was good at it, because she was about as exciting as a brick wall and anyone who tried to fight a brick wall usually found themselves smeared into paste against it.
(He only sent Jinx when he didn’t want things to be quiet, when he wanted a message conveyed. That’d never really stopped her from accompanying Sevika on a couple hits, though.)
But there was one gang that Sevika couldn't pin down, no matter the amount of firepower she dedicated to their eradication. It was hard to shoot fireflies, after all.
Before they enter the tunnels, Ekko unslings a bag of things off of his shoulder and tosses it to her. “Might want to bring this.”
It jangles a bit when she catches it, and Jinx frowns because she’s pretty sure she can feel Fishbone’s old head knocking against her shin.
“This is just junk,” she retorts. “We won’t find the parts.”
“We will.” Ekko surprises her for the nth time and takes her hand. His grip is firmer than she would’ve expected and she starts, staring at the wrap of gloved fingers around her limp hand as stars and hearts flash in her peripheral vision like floaters. “Promise.”
She stares at him. He holds her gaze, steady and patient. When Jinx nods, slowly, Ekko smiles at her. He just shrugs his shoulders at her in a ‘come-on’ gesture and tugs her into the alleys of the Undercity. She follows, her eyes trained at the nape of his neck, the slope of his back. It’s becoming a familiar sight.
The tunnels that Ekko leads her through aren’t stinking of chemical waste or industrial dumps. They grow moss and slightly irradiated lichen, soaked in very hard water and smelling of metal and leaves. Jinx follows at a cautious pace behind him, committing the warren-layout of these tunnels to memory despite herself as Ekko turns corners, climbs ladders, and crosses deep cavernous rifts over merrily painted bridges made out of scrap wood and nails.
“Watch your step,” he would say, as if she’s a blundery little kid who would trip over the nearest divot in the ground. Or: “ceiling’s low here, keep your head down.”
“I got it,” Jinx snaps after several more of these. “Thanks.”
Somehow she can hear his eyes roll at the saccharine sarcasm dripping from her voice but he stops with the cautions after that. When she bonks her head on a low-hanging beam, his snicker echoes through the tunnel and she kicks at his ankles in retaliation.
When they’re trudging through what he claims to be the last series of tunnels, Ekko asks her to cover her eyes. She squints at him suspiciously and he just rolls his eyes.
“Humor me.”
When she doesn’t budge, Ekko reaches for her hands again. She flinches but he’s gentle with her, moving her hands to cover her eyes like they’re going to play hide and seek. She’s done that with him recently, before the river took Silco. Hide and seek with him and his buzzing fireflies.
His thumb traces over her metal finger and Jinx stiffens.
“This is different,” Ekko mumbles, and she just chuckles acerbically. Of course he would notice how the fingers that used to scratch his face have lost a beloved fellow warrior.
“Accident,” she mumbles, and while he raises an eyebrow at her he doesn’t pursue the topic further, for which she’s grateful.
He guides her the last few hundred feet of the way, and Jinx is tempted to tell him that covering her eyes isn’t doing a lot to throw off her sense of direction, but eventually something warm hits her face and she scrunches up her nose in an instinct to recoil before his fingers pull away.
Sunlight practically blinds her for a second and she screws her eyes against its glare, but then as they adjust and Jinx steps, blinking, further into the light, her breath all but stops.
She doesn’t have to ask Ekko what this place is. The whole grove drips of his touch, of the juxtaposition of her former best friend. The tree stretches towards the sun and yet blankets the ground in shade; green, glowing things like moss and grasses cling to the corroded metal, and tiny paper boats and upturned bicycles float in the nearby pools of sump water, fenced off with colorful warning signs meant for children.
And the tree—
The tree is the prettiest headstone Jinx has ever seen. Not that she’s ever seen one; only Topsiders has the luxury of cemeteries and their permanence. Piltover remembers their dead with memorials made of forever stone and a never ending parade of candles and flowers, while The Undercity commemorates its dead with graffiti, violence, and the river.
But this mural is gentle. The dead in Jinx’s head look nothing like they do here, vividly painted in bright, reverent shades so life-like that she half-expects them all, Benzo, Mylo, Claggor, Vander, oh, Vander, to come twirling out of the trunk and embrace her. Even Powder’s there, beaming because she isn’t Jinx yet. They’re smiling the old smiles that had shaped her heart to be soft and the stab of longing for them is so sharp she staggers back as if she’d been stabbed.
Of course his graveyard would be sweeter than hers.
Ekko is steady beside her, watching her more than the mural itself. “You okay?”
(it’s déjà vu following the throb of her throat as she drinks in the mural with the same greedy wonder as her)
“It’s just—” she chokes, and then tries again. “You remember them so pretty. All of it.”
“They’re who we’re fighting for,” he responds quietly. “It’s the least we can do.”
“They sit in my head,” Jinx confesses suddenly through a rough throat. She gestures uselessly at the mural. “They don’t look like—like that in there.”
Ekko’s gaze is hot as sunshine on her face. “I have nightmares too. It took me a while to pick up a can because I worried that all that could come out was blood and memory.”
He folds himself into a heap onto the ground, slinging his bag of things with a clang beside him. “This sort of thing takes practice, I think.” He crooks a smile at her. “And friends to do it with.”
Jinx curls up beside him. With her knees drawn up to her chin and her arms clutching them to herself like she’d clutched that captain’s wheel to her body, she feels smaller than ever. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“With a friend.” Ekko reaches out into that space between them. Half an offer, half a casual stretch. There’s room for her to refuse. “With friends.”
Jinx blinks at him. Around them, there’s flickers of movements in the shaft; curious heads poking out of sheds, neon-green streaks of hoverboards ribboning into view, and masked silhouettes apprating in the boughs of this fantastical tree. She recognizes a few faces from Stillwater: the hulking Vastaya, the girl with a magpie skull for a face, the boy with a leaden pipe slung arrogantly across his shoulders.
And children; they’re everywhere, pressed against the recesses of walls, hidden in the branches, crouched in the grass. She shrinks back despite herself because something about their mismatched teeth, tiny bodies, and solemn, too-old demeanor reminds her of Isha, watching her quietly from the sky.
“Kindling,” Jinx mumbles, overwhelmed by a vision of their bodies laid out in front of her with their eyes merrily crossed out, trees growing from their scalps. Her hand scrambles for his, a drowning swimmer grabbing for purchase.
“No,” Ekko counters quietly, gripping her hand back tight and firm. “A garden.”
“Ekko! Ekko, you’re back!”
Jinx flinches as the magic of the moment shatters when the gaggle of snot-nosed brats clambers down the tree and tumble all over each other in their haste to reach Ekko, who’s dropped his sack of things to greet them with a big smile. She hangs back, watching them through narrowed eyes as a couple of the tinier ones bawl about how they thought he was dead.
(You and me both, kid.)
Ekko takes their yelling in stride. He ruffles their hair, tweaks a couple of braids and apologizes for being gone for so long.
“I had to pick up a friend,” he says, and turns to smile at her. The kids immediately swivel their heads towards her and Jinx can’t help but shrink from their sudden barrage of questions.
“What’s your name?”
“Are you hungry? Do you want my mushroom?”
“I l-i-i-i-i-ke your hair!”
“Are you gonna be a Firelight?”
“She can’t, she’s too scrawny.”
Jinx bristles at that, because what the hell, before Ekko steps in. “Let’s give her some space, guys. We’ll have to catch up in a bit, yeah?
“Come on,” he says quietly to Jinx, taking her hand and leading her to the base of the tree. She follows, quickly, because all that attention feels like sun exposure, prickling her skin and making her face red and hot. When she glances back despite herself, she sees one of the kids, the tiniest one with scales for skin, waving shyly at her back. Her webbed fingers gleam gossamer in the sunlight as she mouths: “Bye-bye, Blue Girl—!”
The stairway around the tree winds up and up and up. As they climb the steps, circling its enormous trunk like the steps in a fairy tale tower, Jinx can hear the birds clearer, swears that she can breathe newer air closer to the top. At the top, Ekko waits for her to take it all in, the color, the green, the stillness. It’s a kind of peaceful that she thought only existed in the river, but unlike Silco’s dead calm, this is a busy sort of stillness. The quiet of activity, the softness of lights flashing under a closed door behind where a party is happening.
It’s a beautiful quiet.
Jinx toes the edge of the stairs, her eyes darting down, before she feels his gloved hand on her shoulder.
“You comin’?”
“Yeah,” she grumbles. Mother hen.
Halfway up the tree, a familiar pointy-ear silhouette that her calf has to thank for its permanent jagged smile meets them on the stairs. His claws have curled into fists at his side and beside her, Ekko sucks in a breath and lets it go in a relieved huff of laughter.
“Scar.”
The tall bat Vastaya stares at them like he’s seen a ghost. She can’t blame him; up close they probably look a wreck. But then he surges forward and Jinx barely has the time to flinch before he surprises both of them by hugging them. One arm clutching Ekko, another slung around Jinx. She stiffens but she can feel Ekko melting into the embrace beside her, holding on longer when the tall Vastaya steps away from them.
Then Scar clocks Ekko on the jaw.
Ekko catches himself on the railing of the stairs with a crash as Scar wrings his hand with a huff. Jinx feels Shimmer heat her blood until Ekko grasps her hand and pulls himself back up with a wince.
“Do not ever do that to me again,” Scar growls.
Ekko rubs his chin, where the skin is already purpling. “I won’t.”
“Good.” Scar wrings his hand, huffing, and then glances at Jinx. “Sorry you had to see that. It’s good to see you again, Jinx.”
She ducks her head, her gut roiling uncomfortably at the warmth in his voice. “H-hey.”
“We owe you a lot for Stillwater,” Scar says, and out of the corner of her eye Jinx can see Ekko listening, of Isha’s braids just outside the door. “I know the others have been wanting to thank you in person.”
“Can’t build a machine gun with thanks,” Jinx mumbles, but she makes a sort of attempt of a smile at Scar until he nods and turns back to Ekko.
“Where’s Heimer?”
Ekko’s face shutters. “Didn’t make it.”
“I’m sorry.” Scar’s face is grave. “The little ones will miss him.”
“We can tell them later.” Jinx watches as the cold white mask of the owl’s porcelain features settles over Ekko’s face, transforming him back into the sumpsnipe gang leader that she grew up facing. He begins climbing the stairs again. “Get us up to speed. What’s the situation like?”
As Scar goes general-mode and begins yapping, Jinx tunes him out to watch Ekko’s face. While Silco had held his men to his chest like knives under a jacket lapel, Ekko instead cups his Firelights in his hands like water from a stream. He pours them over the Lanes to illuminate the dark with hope and light and all the things that Jinx can never be; they may have revered her, but he was beloved. It’s obvious they still do, just from the way Scar defers to him, how the children run to him. Unlike her, he wears the crown well. She’s both jealous and strangely wistful.
“Barreck and Luiza have already left for Topside,” Scar’s saying when she finally tunes back. “Femi’s staying for the little ones, but you can tell she’s itching for a fight, despite what she says…”
Ekko’s fingers tap restlessly on his thigh. “What about resources? Who do we have left?”
“We’re runnin’ short, but the twins are out on supply runs,” Scar rumbles as he glances down the length of the tree, where the other Firelights mill small and sweet on the ground. “They should be back any minute. Perry and Hendricks are still around, but Perry lost an eye in the whole Stillwater debacle and you know how Hendricks doesn’t go where Perry isn’t…”
He laughs acerbically. “Before you left, we were pressed for room and food. Now, we’ve only a handful to worry about, including the cubs. And they’re itching for a fight, all of them.”
“Good,” Ekko says in a voice Jinx has rarely heard from him without his mask’s modulation. “Because we’ve a home to defend.”
He extends his hand out to Scar. “You with me for one more fight?”
Scar clasps it. “Always.”
“Hey,” Jinx snaps, stung from where she’s totally being ignored behind them, “Don’t forget about me.”
Ekko rolls his eyes fondly towards her. “Never.”
“You’re with us on this?” Scar asks, some surprise coloring his voice.
Jinx shrugs. “I have a sister’s butt to save. You know how family’s like.”
Scar chuckles, the sound suddenly father-fond, and Jinx suddenly remembers that one of the taller kids was carrying a baby in her arms, a fat little gray thing with ears like Scar’s and teeth like terror. “Stuck in you like hooks, ay.”
They’ve reached the top of the tree. Scar shoves open the door to a veritable heap of parts, spare and new and some in a half-state of between, piled in heaps around a worktable that Jinx recognizes with a twinge of memory as one of the old benches from Benzo’s place. Scar shuffles inside, clapping Ekko on the shoulder.
“Welcome back, boss. And Jinx—”
From the pile, he scoops up the dilapidated chassis of a broken hoverboard and flings it to her alongside a ferocious smile that’s all fang, a smile that his mask had hidden from her until that day in Stillwater.
“—welcome to the Firelights.”
Once upon a time, Jinx died.
She couldn’t remember if she had died on the bridge or on that grimy cot in that creep of a doctor’s lair. She had wished it to be on the bridge; at least she would’ve gone with a friend instead of being knifed apart by a psycho who kept brains in jars and pumped blood-hungry Shimmer into her body just to see what made her tick.
And the bastard babbled. Oh, did he. He wound and rewound his stupid music box until its tinny melody scorched itself into her brain while he mused, half to her and half to himself, about the splendor of unlife. A recently deceased corpse that he had taken apart showed marvelous levels of brain activity. What fluids continued to dredge through the system was the same chemicals found in happy brains. The body, the doctor remarked as lightly as one would consider the imminent weather, must be remembering their happiest moments in life before the inevitable passage to death.
“But what happens when the brain is severed from the body?” the doctor had asked the sharp air. “What’s left to remember happiness?”
He wound the key again. “The heart, perhaps.”
Jinx pried herself free the next day. What a load of crap.
She doesn’t know why his weirdly wistful words follow her even into this pretty green here. Maybe it’s because this whole place reeks of heart and love and all those stubborn flowers that somehow grow from trash piles that she and Vi used to pick to give to Vander on his birthday. Maybe it’s because her head jerks at every childish laugh that reverberates from around her, anticipating a childish bullet to ricochet off of her knees, kapwing, and lodge itself deep where she had once thought unreachable. Maybe it’s because the older Firelights keep bringing her food and scrap metals and kindness that doesn’t grate as much as she initially thought it would. Maybe it’s because Scar lets her hold his daughter once and she nearly freaks out because this tiny little bundle of strange newness who doesn’t know jackshit about the world somehow knows not to break skin when gnawing on her hand.
Even a baby, gentle. How can a baby be better than her?
Jinx haunts the mural frequently between fits of furious work. She wonders if it’s because Ekko had somehow captured the real Powder inside the paint and she’s calling to her other half from the tree’s insides. Maybe that’s why the thing is sick and purpling. It’s got a bug inside. Or a ghost.
“It’s called the Arcane,” Ekko tells her as she twirls a leaf streaked with sickness. “It’s what pulled me into another world.”
Jinx splits a vein of purple with her nail and smears it around on her thumb. “Looks icky.”
“Felt icky.” Ekko glances up into the sunlight filtering through the tree’s canopy, still green and lush but for the streaks of spreading purple. “That—Hex Vault thing felt— it felt cruel. It’s in our water so that’s why it needs to go. That and whatever’s being controlled by it.”
“How many times do you gotta hit a fortune cookie before it splits?” Jinx flicks the ruined leaf away and watches it drift onto the ground. “Trick question! You blast him to smithereens.”
Ekko glances at her over his shoulder. “Are we still talking about the same thing?”
She unfolds herself from the scaffolding and lopes down the rest of the way. “You tell me, wise guy.”
Apparently this juicy little tidbit is enough to get a plan set in place. Ekko says that they have to have a meeting though. Jinx is deeply tempted to inform the lot of them during a particularly snooze-inducing one that this is why they’ve never been able to truly take down Silco’s shipping lines, but she perks up when Ekko draws a little crescent line through the city to the docks where little red rectangles representing the Noxians perch on the map.
“We come through here, support the Topsiders from the air. Their crossbows don’t reach this far up—” he draws a quick upward line, scribbles a measurement beside it, “so we can just hoverboard the rest of the way to get up close.”
“We need ground forces to keep any shooters busy.” Scar’s voice is troubled. “Without Barreck and Luiza, we’ll be spread thin if we divide up what fighters we have.”
“I can get a few people to help.” Jinx’s voice echoes hoarsely through the Firelights’ meeting room and bites her lip against the several surprised gazes that meet hers, Ekko’s including. She squirms in place and fingers the collar of Ekko’s jacket, her eyes dropping to the floor. “I know folks.”
“Silco’s men?” The girl who speaks up doesn’t speak harshly, but there’s a twinge of steel underneath her tone that makes pink haze the edge of Jinx’s vision.
“Femi,” Ekko says warningly, but Miss Magpie-Skull-For-a-Face just shrugs, her arms folded loosely over her chest.
“Just saying. Workin’ with Chembaron goons ain’t exactly my thing.”
“They aren’t gonna be Chembaron goons,” Jinx snaps. “They’re gonna be Zaunites.”
One of the green-haired boys whistles through his teeth. “Think they're gonna like that pitch, doll?”
“I think they might like not losing their turf to a bunch of magic zombie robots,” Jinx shoots back. “I know I wouldn’t.”
“Can you convince them, Jinx?” Ekko’s voice is steady but it cuts through the agitated murmurings of the other Firelights. Jinx holds his gaze tiredly as she sinks back into the corner of the room, her hands twirling duets around each other.
“I’ll give it the ol’ college try.”
“We’ll put in our worth too,” Scar rumbles. “We’ll rally whoever’s left, whoever can still hold a weapon and fight. We’ll give Noxus a taste of true Lane Pain and show Topside what we’re made of at the same time. Yeah?”
There’s a rousing “hurrah” and a bunch of raised fists in the air. It’s all very sweet and touching. As soon as they launch into talking shop, Jinx makes a beeline outta there. Mylo’s starting to whisper in her head again and she needs air and way less eyes staring at her. She gets about a dozen steps down the tree when she promptly steps over a brat and she nearly loses her shit.
“Sorry,” the kid lisps, and Jinx wants to scream because why do all kids have such huge eyes?! “I broke my board and I dunno how to fix it.”
Hey, Jinx, here’s another kid to fuck up. You excited? That’s two so far!
“Why’re you coming to me?” Jinx rasps, silently screaming at Mylo to shut up, shut up for a goddamned second! “Go ask someone else.”
“They’re all in a meeting,” the brat mumbles, clutching the smoking and frankly awfully assembled board to his chest. “We’re not allowed to bother ‘em when they’re meeting. You’re the only grown-up that came out.”
“Oh, for the love of—give me that,” Jinx snaps, taking the board from the suddenly grinning boy (don’t smile like that, don’t smile like that, don’t smile like HER) and turning it over in her hands. She sucks on her teeth as she looks over the busted fan system and the very bent chassis. “Geez, you really did a number on this.”
“Wasn’t me,” the boy sulks. “Ava pushed me.”
“And that explains this broken fan how?” Jinx retorts, tapping on the crooked blades with her nail until the boy rubs his neck and mumbles something that sounds like “—andIranitintoawall.”
“See? That wasn’t so hard, wasn’t it?” She smiles crookedly at the boy and he returns it in a grumpy sort of wattage. He follows her to the downstairs workshop where there’s a proper forge and lens system and she shows him what parts are busted and need to be replaced and which parts could be salvaged from the wreck. As he scurries out to grab new bits from their junk heap, she even takes the time to put a new fan guard on for the guy because exposed fan blades? That’s a yikes and a half for stubby fingers.
Old habits are one hell of a grief suppressant. At least, that’s what she thinks all the way through the boy’s delighted whoop and surprise hug before he runs off taking his brand-new board and the levity with him, leaving her in the workshop with a very complicated feeling boring into her chest. She takes out her consternation by hauling out a half-finished Rhino, Fishbones’ new big brother, and feverishly burying herself in his guts until the sunlight on the ground turns orange and Ekko joins her to fix his own hoverboard with a gingerness that tips her off that he knows what she just did.
“You know the kids like you?”
“It’s just ‘cause I’m the new thing in town,” Jinx responds shortly, twisting off a lug nut with such force it rattles onto the floor and rolls all the way over to Ekko’s boot. “Give it a few days and the shine’ll wear off. Oh, wait, we don’t have a few days.”
Ekko bends down to retrieve the nut and peers through it like it’s a lens through which he can make sense of her. “I think they can tell you’re not really a bad person at heart. Kids can tell that sort of thing, you know?”
“That’s a lie. Kids are stupid,” Jinx scoffs. But it comes out half-hearted and she half-regrets the words once they leave her mouth, like vomit re-swallowed. Her throat burns and she lets her wrench clatter back on the table as her free hand shoves grease across her face like tears. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Ekko stands up and puts the lugnut back onto the table. His eyes are on her though, and the tiny, traitorous tear that’s streaking down that smelly grease smudge. “Hey, it’s okay.”
“No, it’s not,” Jinx grits out, her throat gulping sobs in that awful way where she’s trying not to cry and utterly, spectacularly, failing. “I hate kids. I hate them I hate them I hate them.”
“Jinx,” Ekko says, his eyes wide, as the big tears finally spill over and she begins to actually sob, wrenching and burning like how it felt when Shimmer ate all of her blood and made a home in her bones. She gasps her breath, pounding her ribs because that’s where all the pain is, right in her chest, before a pair of gloved hands grabs her wrists and pulls them apart and around a solid, warm body.
The hug is too tight. Ekko’s squeezing the life out of her. Jinx gasps and sobs and clutches him so tight she can feel the breath actually escape out of his lungs. She wants to keep squeezing. She wants all of his breath to himself. She buries her face into his chest and cries so hard she’s actually in pain, but he holds her tight and his mouth is against the crown of her head muttering vague assurances and Jinx knows for sure that the doctor was off his rocker because how can the heart remember happiness when it’s the one aching so fucking hard?
“I miss her,” she blubbers into Ekko’s collarbone. “I miss her so m-u-u-u-ch.”
Ekko mumbles something into her hair that she can’t catch and holds her close. He’s practically wringing her like a rag but she likes it. Maybe he can wring out all the tears inside of her so she doesn’t have to cry ever again. She’s tired of crying. But here she is, shaking so hard in Ekko’s arms that she might actually puke. He hangs on tight, though, a lighthouse shining determinedly over a pitch, pitching ocean. She wishes crying didn’t feel like drowning.
“I got you,” Ekko says, over and over again over her wracking sobs. The lifeguard swimming to the drowning man. But her hands can easily push him under and kill him too. Silco taught her that. Panic kills compassion kills her kill him. Maybe he can keep her company on the way down.
“You’re giving yourself a lot of credit,” he mumbles into her hair. Shit. Did she say something aloud? “I’m pretty hard to kill.”
“Me, too,” Jinx hiccups. “Something always stops me.”
He’s quiet after that. It’s an Isha sort of quiet. Busy head, quiet mouth. His hands do the talking instead. They run through her hair, pushing it away from her wet, snotty face. They cup her cheeks, thumbing the wet away. Jinx glances up at him, her lip quivering, and his eyes do that thing again, troubled and soft and longing all at once.
It’s like a thunderbolt hits her upside the head.
“You’re never gonna give up, are you?” Jinx croaks. “Boy Savior, always gonna save the world? Huh?”
Ekko scoffs, a huff of breath against her hair. “Never gonna stop trying, at least.”
She shudders at that. He strokes the top of her head with his thumb and Jinx tiredly thumps her head against his heart. She listens to it pump until every heartbeat begins to sound like a countdown, bits of sand rattling around an hourglass.
A memory. A dream, half-remembered.
“Hey, Isha, look. This is special paint. Lane paint. Water can’t wash it off. We made it so those dumbass Enforcers can’t hose them off easy. At least, not unless they got that special stuff, huhu. And that’s a pretty penny, so even they don’t really get to it unless you painted something really awful. Like really awful. You feel me?”
“...?”
“I guess what I’m saying is go nuts. Draw something, anything. It’ll be there forever. Well, maybe not. But it’ll be there a while. That’s why the walls are that color. Lots of people painting since forever. C’mon, give it a shot.”
“...”
“Eugh, that’s the best you can do?Kid, you got two cans and two hands. You gotta really send a message, really puff up their skirts. Make ‘em remember you!”
“...?”
“Hey, that’s a bit better. Don’t be shy to go crazy with the lines. Like this. Hup!”
“...!”
“Yeah, that’s the stuff! Go crazy! Yeah, go, Isha! Tell’em who you are, you great big giant! Rawr!!!”
“...! …!”
She wakes up on the floor with a laugh in her throat and tears sticky on her face.
“You leavin’ us already?”
Hand on the first of the ladder rungs, Jinx stills. She twirls on her heel and glances up in the shadows, where Femi perches like a vulture in the rafters above the entrance tunnel, her gangly limbs dangling.
“Just for a lil bit,” Jinx hums softly. She taps her head. “I have a brain worm itching in here. It’ll be upset if I don’t take care of it.”
Femi’s eyes narrow. “The boss’ll be upset in the mornin’. Can I at least tell ‘im where you headin’? That way I won’t get in trouble for slackin’ off and he won’t tear up the Lanes lookin’ for your ass.”
Jinx sniffs. As if Miss Magpie Skull Face knows what she’s talking about. “He’ll know where to find me.”
She gets about halfway up the ladder leading outside when Femi speaks up again. “Oi, Jinx?”
When Jinx turns around, the other girl has slung herself down to look her right in the eyes. Her expression is gentler, almost meltingly pretty without a furrow between her brows. “Hey, listen, I’m sorry for what I said back there. I—A lot of us lost family to those mob bosses downstairs and I took it out on you. I know things are different now with you joinin’ and once you’re part of the Firelights, you’re one of us, proper, yeah? And family don’t fight.’
“Oh, they one hundo percent do,” Jinx replies instinctively, but her eyes are trained on Femi’s outstretched hand. She doesn't know what to make of this, really. “Er, it’s fine. I need to go.”
“Don’t stay out too late!” Femi calls out behind her, and Jinx throws up a middle finger and the board that Scar gave into cruise control onto the ground and jumps up, zipping off into the tunnels out of the warren of the Firelights.
The shaft is quiet when she returns. The Chompers that she’d set in place to boobytrap intruders have long been disabled, lying inert on the ground like eggs as she steps over them and drops her things on the huge fan of the turbine with an echoing thud. After the brightness of the Firelight haunt, the turbine feels almost claustrophobic now. The shaft seems to strain upwards, its beams and modified blades cramped and bristling as Jinx sucks in a breath.
“It wants to get out,” she realizes softly. “Wants to fly away.”
She collects the Chompers from the ground. A few shakes show the neutralized Chemtech juices inside. Ekko probably went around disabling them while she was in her funk. Probably afraid she’d get her hands on them. She pockets them quietly and keeps going.
The blanket fort is untouched. Not even Ekko or Sevika went near it. Jinx sinks into a seat in front of it, looking at the rumpled pillows and the candles burnt to stubs. From her bags she unravels Isha’s blanket. She doesn’t remember packing it but it’s here anyway. Jinx rubs her cheek against it for a moment and then folds it neatly onto the pile of pillows where the indentation of a tiny body still manages to remain. Stubborn even in the imprints she left behind.
“I think you’re gonna be a needle in my pocket forever, kid,” Jinx tells the air. She runs her hand over the indentation, her fingers feathering every nook and cranny. “And I think I have to be okay with that.”
She empties her bag. Just about the entire stash of the Firelights’ paint supplies rolls onto the floor. Spray cans, finger paints, body paint. These metal cans are a Zaunite pyre. Impermanence made permanent. There are no marble crypts here. Just paint.
So Jinx paints. She shakes the spray cans and begins tagging every single surface of the turbine. She keeps going until the constant hiss of the cans fades into background noise and the fumes of the paints make her dizzy. She keeps going until there’s color on every bit of blackened metal on the turbine. Even when the doors to the lair burst open and Ekko tumbles in a relieved heap behind her, she keeps going, painting until her arm’s beginning to get sore and her neck gets a crick from looking up and down and around so much.
“Hey, Little Man,” Jinx says once Ekko’s finished shouting, “wanna help me paint?”
He catches the can she tosses to him with a furrow between his brow but as he turns around to see what she’s drawn so far, his expression smooths out and he nods slowly, eyes flicking from her to the paint and back to the abandoned Chompers on the ground.
“You scared me to death,” he says accusingly, still running hot, and Jinx lowers her can to blink at him.
“I just had something I need to do,” she says with a shrug, and resumes painting a pink dizzy star on the shaft.
Eventually Ekko calms down. He gets it quick—he always had a mind that worked fast. He grabs the green spray cans because of course and starts tagging the fans with hourglasses. She makes a face at him and he just narrows his eyes at her and then has the audacity to smear his hand with paint and tag her arm as she attempts to reach past him for a fresh can. Jinx squeals at the stinging cold of the paint rapidly drying on her skin and she whirls around to glare at him as he tilts his head at her, a trace of that old smugness flirting at his lips.
“You deserve it,” he says, and it’s like they’re kids again when he used to sulk after losing another of their duels and she would hand him the paint gun to allow him a free shot only for him to play dirty and pounce her with a paint capsule instead. Jinx feels the memory float through her like bubbles and bares her teeth at him.
“Get back here,” she snarls, and Ekko barks out a short, sharp laugh as he dodges her attempts to tag him with relative ease until she growls and goes Shimmer fast to land a hit on his hip. He yelps and she pumps her fist with victory until he calls her a cheater and grabs her shoulder.
His hand, bigger than hers, smears green down her arm. “Payback.”
She glares at him, her eyes watering from the smell of acrid paint, and he just cocks his head at her, his locs almost glowing in this dim light. Her chest seizes and Jinx suddenly realizes how much she misses this. Friends. Family. Voices in her head that don’t belong to the dead.
When the silence stretches, arrogance drips off of Ekko’s face until his expression mirrors her. His hand still grainy from paint remains on her arm, his thumb idly tracing the swirls of her clouds. They’ve long since faded but Jinx finds herself oddly entranced by how the green smears across the blue curls on her arm.
“I—” her voice sounds like a thundercrack in this weird, tense silence and she tries again. “I made a friend. Her name was Isha and I taught her how to paint because she never painted before. She got really good at it and eventually she wanted me to paint her hair. Blue, like mine. She even wanted me to paint my clouds on her arms. Stupid kid was a big copycat.”
Jinx sniffs. “It was easier when it was Silco. He had his own thing going on. I could start to move on, let him rattle around my brain sometimes if he needs to stay over. But her, but Isha, she’s so much of me that now I can’t even look in the mirror without thinking about her. And now—” her voice cracks on a smile, “—now I don’t know whether to hate what I am because I am who she wanted to be or if I want to stay me because she liked me for me.”
She falters to a stop, her face red, but then Ekko’s hand grips her. “No, I understand. For what it’s worth, it sounds like she would like you being you. Someone who let her just be a kid. Someone who inspired her. Someone whose ideas could change the world.”
Jinx squeezes her eyes shut as salt trickles down her face. They’re not the wracking sobs that had so incapacitated her in the Firelight workshop, but a gloved thumb wipes the wet away regardless. Her eyes flutter open as Ekko crooks a smile at her, soft. Warm. She’s getting familiar with this smile. It’s no longer frightening her.
Ekko suddenly swears softly and Jinx dashes the tears away. “What?”
“Sorry. I just got some—here, let me—” he rubs the heel of his palm on her face but the leather just smears more green on her face and he hisses. “Shit. Hold on.”
Jinx glances at one of the lightcatchers spinning from she and Isha had hung them above the fort and sees the mess that he’s left on her. Green, odd and bright on her.
Something curls deep inside her tummy. She remembers hunting down those hourglasses around the Undercity, determined to unearth that mysterious warren deep in the intestines of the Lanes where the cement had buried a baby friend and spat back out a man with an owl's face and an enemy’s growl. She remembers understanding why green was the color of envy as more and more masked youth joined the owl on raids, remembers how her head was full of squealing fireflies long afterwards, remembers searching desperately through her own brain for an owl to taunt her, but never finding him, no matter how bad the attacks got.
She remembers the loneliness.
Jinx takes Ekko’s moving wrist in her hand. He goes still, blinking guilty eyes at her, before they widen as she deliberately pushes his fingers, damp with paint, down her neck, onto her shoulder, deep into her waist. Paint smears her a vivid green stripe all the way down her body become canvas.
His hand is burning her through his gloves.
Jinx holds his gaze solid steady. His breathing has deepened and quickened, prey breath, and he rips his hand away and in that moment Jinx thinks he might run away.
Instead, he shucks off those paint-laden gloves and lets them fall, plop plop, onto the ground. His hands bare, he bends down and runs a finger through one of the open paint cans at their feet and stands.
Jinx sucks in a sharp breath as he draws the finger across her neck. Spreading out with his thumbs the shape of butterflies on the column of her throat. Tattooing the breadth of her shoulders with green, pink, blue. He paints a mural upon her in true funeral, Zaunite fashion, watching her while he works, and Jinx lets her eyes flutter closed and allows the colors to cover her like river water, like baptism, like renewal. For the first time in a long, long time, her head is perfectly quiet.
How many times can you become something new before you’re something else entirely? And will it ever work for someone whose tender core has long since been pared away? Who has the hands gentle enough to handle something so raw?
Eventually his hands stop moving and Jinx opens her eyes to find Ekko looking over his handiwork. His expression is unexpectedly sad.
“So much time gone.” He drags one last shape just above her breast and she tries to peer down at what he’s drawn. “I wish—”
“No wishes in Zaun, Little Man.” Jinx has finally made out the shape. The real thing beats jackrabbit quick in her chest, straining against its ribcage. Wanting to escape like her blimp in utero. “Just people.”
Ekko looks up at her, his lashes shadowing his pretty earth eyes. She puts her hands on her chest and breathes deep. “Family. Stuck like hooks in you.”
He smiles crookedly at her. It’s her favorite smile because it reminds her of home. “Our past and future.”
Ekko reaches down to grab her hand. His fingers squeeze hers tight. “We doin’ this? Together?”
Jinx squeezes back. Out of the corner of her eye she sees the lightcatchers twisting in the air, throwing a thousand bits of diamonds into the darkness. In this dim light, one can mistake them for fireflies.
She takes a deep breath. “Yeah, okay. We’re doing this.”
Ekko nods and begins walking. She follows after him, her hand in his, to the turbine. There Isha dances above them, humming and jumping from girder to girder with her arms outstretched, a piece of blue chalk in her left hand and a piece of pink in her right, jumping higher and higher until she’s soaring out of the cavern and disappearing into the light of the sea-blue sky.
epilogue:
The kids have just finished streaking her bangs with purple when Argot tumbles into the shaft breathless with news. This is it, go-time, all hands on deck. Ekko sits up from his seat at the base of the tree and bangs the pipe in his hand against the ground sharply.
The Firelights fly to work. Scar bellows orders and the fighters slide on their masks, grab their designated parts and zip up to the top of the shaft where the blimp, disassembled and reassembled over consecutive hours of work, is perched. Jinx pushes herself to her feet as the little ones pack up their things in a hurry and run to their designated hidey-holes and strides over to where Ekko’s waiting for her by the base of the tree, the paints already in hand.
“Hurry,” he says, and she follows quick to where he pushes the door to his workshop open and kicks it shut behind them.
They reach for each other at the same time. It’s quick and sloppy, nothing like the first time when he had stretched out every second until she could barely bear it. But even he can’t rewind far enough back to a time where they have a forever to do this, so he focuses on the little details. A crown on her arm, little hourglasses everywhere. He smudges pink under her eyes at her request, and allows her to sign the casing in his locs. She smirks when he presses a painted X across her chest with just as much a blush as the day where he had hosed her down in the junkyard and just because she wants to ink that blush into her brain she retaliates with two stripes of pink across his own chest, her hand lingering a little too long on where the hem cuts off above his stomach until he grabs her hand and smears green down her clouded arms until the faded swirls are no longer visible. All the while their hearts beat boom boom, their heads full of the girl they’re fighting for.
It’s a funeral, almost. Not quite. The logs have been stacked and the gasoline poured but they’re still standing unburnt and whole.
“We have to go,” Ekko murmurs eventually. “The others will be waiting.”
“One more second,” Jinx mutters, preoccupied with pressing pink into the expanse of his chest. “Just one more.”
He sighs, looks outside where the rest of the Firelights are swooping around, alerting ground forces and performing last minute weapons checks. Scar’ll be wondering where he is at such a critical moment, but the traitorous parts of him caves and Ekko relents.
“One more.”
A final mural, a final remembrance. One more for the end of the world.
.
.
.
fin