Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Jinx was twelve when she moved into Silco's apartment.

It was a Thursday, but the day of the week didn't matter to the system, they didn't hold transitions for Fridays or weekends or for school or any of the small courtesies that might have made the process of being relocated to yet another stranger's home make one feel less like being a package rerouted through a sorting facility without care. The social worker, a tired woman named Sevika who had been assigned to Jinx's case for approximately three months and who would be reassigned to someone else within the year, drove her across the undercity in a vehicle that smelled like stale coffee and air freshener, making polite conversation about the weather and the upcoming school term that Jinx did not participate in because she was twelve and had been through four homes already and had learned that conversation with social workers was a performative exercise that changed nothing about what happened when the conversation ended.

The apartment was in the Lanes, a neighborhood in the lower district of Zaun that existed in the narrow margin between functional and falling apart. The building was a five-story walk-up with a buzzer system that didn't work and a front door that had to be shouldered open most of the time because the frame had warped with age. The hallway inside smelled like cooking oil and something chemical and faintly sweet, the particular olfactory signature of a building where people lived in close proximity to each other and to the industrial processes that defined Zaun's economy. The walls were a shade of green that might have been intentional or might have been the result of decades of environmental exposure, and the light fixtures on each landing provided illumination that was more suggestive than functional, casting everything in a dim, yellowish wash that made the whole building feel like it existed at the bottom of something.

Silco's apartment was on the fourth floor, number 4C. The door had a deadbolt and a chain and a peephole, and when Sevika knocked, the man who answered it looked exactly like the photograph in his file but was nothing like what Jinx had expected.

The first thing she noticed was how thin he was. He was average height but seemed taller because of the way he held himself, straight-backed and still, hands held behind his back with a composure that seemed far too unnatural. His face was narrow with sharp features and dark eyes and he had a quality Jinx didn't have the vocabulary to describe at twelve but would later come to understand as penetrating. His eyes looked at her and assessed for something, for utility and weakness.

He had a bad scar running down the left side of his face from temple to jaw, old enough to have healed but fresh enough in its severity that the skin around it was still dark and puckered and the eye on that side was clouded, milky, the iris a different color from the other. It gave his face an asymmetry that was unsettling, as though two different people occupied either half of it: the unmarked side composed and sharp, the scarred side showing something raw.

"You must be Powder," he smiled, and his voice was low and measured and had careful diction from someone who chose every word with intention.

Jinx didn't correct him on the name. She hadn't started using Jinx yet. She wouldn't, not for a while, not until she got to university and the distance from everything before it gave her the space to become someone who wasn't the girl this system had made.

"Yeah," was all she responded then.

Sevika did the handoff with practiced efficiency of someone who had done hundreds of them, walking them both through the expectations and the requirements and the check-in schedule and the emergency contacts and all the bureaucratic scaffolding that surrounded the act of placing a child in a stranger's home. Silco listened with the attentive patience of a man who understood the value of letting systems run their course, nodding at the right moments, asking the right questions, projecting the composed, responsible image of a foster parent who had passed the background checks and the home inspections and every other gatekeeping mechanism the system had erected, which were, Jinx had learned by then, substantially less rigorous than they should have been.

Then Sevika left and the door closed with a sound of finality behind her. And Jinx was alone with him, this man named Silco.

His apartment, her new home, was small. A living room that doubled as a kitchen, separated by a counter that served as the boundary between the two functions. A bathroom with a shower that worked but that produced water at temperatures that ranged from lukewarm to hostile. And two bedrooms, one on either side of the short hallway that led from the living area to the back of the apartment.

Two bedrooms should have meant one for him and one for her. That was how it was supposed to work. That was how it had worked in the other homes, for the most part, where space was allocated and boundaries were maintained and the children got their own rooms, however small, because a door you could close was the minimum the system was supposed to provide.

Silco had a different arrangement in mind.

"You'll be staying with me," he told her, on that first night, standing in the doorway of the larger bedroom, the one with his bed in it, a double mattress with dark sheets and a single pillow. "For now, just until you're settled."

Jinx stood in the hallway with her backpack over one shoulder and the garbage bag that held the rest of her belongings at her feet and she looked at him and she looked at the room and she felt something in her chest that was cold and tight and that she couldn't name yet. She didn't have the vocabulary for what she was feeling, the instinct that something was wrong, these were words that had never been given to her by anyone.

"What about the other room?" she had inquired.

"The other room needs some work. I've been using it for storage. We'll get it sorted for you eventually, but for now, it's better if you're close. You've been through a lot, Powder. I want to make sure you're okay. I want to be able to keep an eye on you."

He said it with care. He said it with measured, deliberate warmth like a parent who was concerned, like a father who wanted to protect.

Jinx didn't have a father then. She had never had one, not really, not one she could remember, and Vi had been the closest thing to family she'd known and Vi was gone, had been gone for two years, swallowed by the same system that had just delivered Jinx to this apartment and this man, and the absence of Vi was a wound that was still fresh enough to bleed when touched and now Jinx was twelve and alone and tired and she didn't want to fight anymore.

"Okay," she nodded.

She slept in his bed that night. He slept beside her, on the other side, with a distance between them that was carefully maintained, about a foot of mattress that he did not cross. She lay with her back to him and her eyes open and a cold, tight thing in her chest pulsing with every breath, and she listened to the sounds of the apartment, the hum of the refrigerator and the distant noise of the street below and the muffled sounds of other tenants living their lives through thin walls, and she thought about Vi.

Jinx thought about Vi's arms around her, the last time, the time before they were separated, when Vi had held her tight and said "I'll come back for you, I promise" and the promise had been fierce and real and made with every ounce of her conviction, and Jinx believed it because she was ten and Vi was her whole world and the idea that a promise from Vi could go unfulfilled was impossible impossible to her. It was as impossible as the sun not rising.

Yet the sun had risen, every morning, and Vi hadn't come back.

And now Jinx was in a stranger's bed in a stranger's apartment in a part of the city she didn't know, and the stranger was breathing beside her, and the foot of distance between them felt like the smallest and the most fragile thing in the world.

This arrangement continued for a year.

Twelve months. Fifty-two weeks. Three hundred and sixty-five nights of sleeping in that bed, in that room, with that carefully maintained foot of distance. Silco was consistent about it, never crossing the invisible line on the mattress, never moving in the night, never doing anything that could be pointed to in a report or an inspection or a conversation with a social worker as concrete, actionable evidence of wrongdoing. He was precise in his boundary maintenance, similar to his precision in the way he spoke and the way he held himself and the way he managed the household with a quiet, absolute authority that left very little room for negotiation.

But boundaries exist in many ways. Jinx learned this the way children learn most things about the adult world, through exposure rather than instruction, absorbing the lesson through her skin and her bones before her brain could articulate what the lesson was.

Silco watched her.

He watched her in the mornings when she got up, tracking her movement from the bed to the door with those dark, asymmetrical eyes. He watched her when she ate, sitting across the small kitchen table with his own meal untouched or barely picked at, his attention on her in a way that made the food in her mouth taste like nothing. He watched her when she did homework, sitting in the living room with her textbooks spread on the floor because there was no desk, and he would stand in the doorway of the kitchen and lean against the frame and his gaze would be there, on her, constant and evaluative and heavy with something she couldn't identify.

He made comments. Small ones, delivered with measured care he applied to everything, remarks about how she was growing, about how she was changing, about the ways her body was beginning to shift in the directions that bodies shift when you're twelve and entering puberty and every part of you feels strange and unfamiliar and not quite yours yet. He said these things as observations, analytical and detached, as though he was noting the weather or the state of the refrigerator, and the clinical tone was itself a kind of armor, a way of making the words seem normal and medical and therefore acceptable, and Jinx didn't know enough to know that they weren't.

She didn't know enough because nobody had told her.

The system had given her a roof and a bed and a man who called himself her guardian and it had not given her the language or the framework to understand that the discomfort she felt, the cold, tight thing that lived in her chest and that never quite went away, was not nervousness or adjustment or the normal difficulty of a new home. It was her body telling her something that her mind hadn't learned to hear yet, the ancient alarm that fires when a boundary is being violated in a way that is too subtle for the conscious mind to catch but that the deeper, older parts of the brain recognize with absolute clarity.

After the first year, she moved into the other bedroom.

Silco made a production of it, clearing out the storage boxes over the course of a weekend, setting up a narrow twin bed that he'd bought secondhand, hanging a curtain in the small window. He presented it to her like a gift, a milestone, evidence of trust and progress. "You're old enough now," he announced, and the implication that she hadn't been old enough before, that the previous year of shared sleeping had been a measure of protection rather than something else, was delivered so smoothly that it almost sounded true.

The room was small. Barely bigger than a closet, with enough space for the bed and a small dresser and nothing else. The window looked out onto the side of the adjacent building, a view of brick and piping and the narrow strip of sky visible between rooftops.

The door did not have a lock.

Jinx asked about this on the first day. She stood in the doorway of her new room and looked at the knob, which was a simple, round, functional knob with no locking mechanism, and she said, "Can we get a lock?"

Silco looked at her from the hallway. His expression was mild, concerned, fatherly. "Why would you need a lock?"

"For privacy."

"Privacy is important," he agreed, in the tone of someone agreeing with a principle while having no intention of implementing it. "But you're thirteen, Powder. You're still young. I need to be able to get to you if something happens. What if there's a fire? What if you're hurt?"

The logic sounded reasonable. The logic was always reasonable. Silco's logic was like a building with a beautiful facade and a rotten foundation, everything on the surface sound and proportioned and correct, and the rot only visible when you looked beneath.

Jinx didn't push the matter then. She had learned, across multiple homes and years, that pushing rarely changed anything and often made things worse. She took the room. She closed the door at night. And she lay in her narrow bed in her tiny room and she listened, the way she had listened in his bed, except now the listening had a different quality because now the sound she was waiting for was the sound of the door opening.

It happened for the first time three weeks later.

She was asleep, or almost asleep, in the drifting space between consciousness and rest, and the sound of the knob turning brought her instantly, completely awake. The door opened. She could see it through her barely-open eyes, the rectangle of light from the hallway widening across the floor, and then his silhouette in the doorway, standing there, still, looking in.

He didn't come in. He stood in the doorway and he looked at her for what felt like minutes but was probably less, and then he pulled the door closed, quietly, carefully, and his footsteps retreated down the hall.

Jinx lay in the dark with her heart hammering and the cold, tight thing in her chest so large it felt like it was pressing on her lungs, and she didn't sleep for the rest of the night.

It happened again and again. Not every night, not even most nights, but frequently enough that the anticipation of it became its own form of torment, the knowledge that at any point during any night the door might open and his silhouette might appear in the frame and he would stand there, watching, and she would lie still and breathe evenly and pretend to be asleep because some instinct deeper than thought told her that pretending was safer than acknowledging.

And it happened during the day.

She would be coming out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, her hair wet and her skin still warm from the water, and the bathroom door would open because the bathroom didn't have a proper lock either, just a flimsy push-button that sometimes held and sometimes didn't, and Silco would be there.

"I'm sorry," he would say, every time, stepping back with raised hands and an expression that seemed of genuine embarrassment. "I didn't realize you were in there. I'll wait."

The first time, she believed him. The second time, she was less certain. By the fifth time, the pattern was too clear to deny even for a thirteen-year-old who didn't have the words for what was happening, because the apartment was small and the shower was audible from every room in it and you could not plausibly fail to realize that someone was in the bathroom when the water was running loud enough to hear from every possible corner.

But he never touched her.

This was the thing that made it so difficult to name, so difficult to hold up to the light and examine and say it was wrong, to call it a violation, to recognize everything as abuse. He never touched her. He never crossed that particular line. The foot of distance on the mattress, the step backward in the bathroom doorway, the threshold of her bedroom that he stood in but never crossed, these were limits he maintained with a discipline that was itself a form of cruelty, because the maintenance of the limits allowed him to pretend, and to make her pretend, that nothing was happening. That the watching was incidental. That the comments were just observational, normal. That the shared bed had been protective. That the opened doors were accidents.

The fog of it, the confusion, the way it made her doubt her own instincts because nothing had happened that she could point to and say that, that was the bad thing, was perhaps the most damaging part. It taught Jinx to distrust herself. It taught her that the cold, tight feeling in her chest was unreliable, that her body's alarm system was faulty, that the discomfort was hers and not his. It taught her that she was the problem, because if she wasn't the problem, then what was happening would have a name and a solution and someone would have stopped it.

Nobody stopped it because nobody knew. Sevika the social worker came by every few months for perfunctory check-ins that lasted twenty minutes and involved questions that Silco had coached Jinx on answering, not through explicit instruction but through the more insidious mechanism of expectation, the understanding, communicated through tone and look and the architecture of their life together, that the correct answer to "How are things at home?" was "Fine."

Things were not fine.

But Jinx survived it, the way she had survived everything before it, through the particular resilience of children who have no other option, the grim, daily miracle of continuing to exist in circumstances that are designed to diminish you. She went to school. She did homework. She ate meals at the small kitchen table under his watchful eyes. She lay in her narrow bed at night and listened for the sound of the door. And she began building things.

She had always built things. As far back as she could remember, before Vi was gone and before the homes and before all of it, she had been a child who understood the world through the mechanism of taking it apart and putting it back together. She would dismantle anything she could get her hands on, alarm clocks and radios and the small appliances that populated the kitchens of the homes she moved through, and she would spread the components out before her and study them with focused, absorbed attention that would later make Professor Viktor call her the most naturally gifted student he had encountered in his years of teaching. Jinx would understand how all these pieces worked intuitively, the way some people understand music or language, a native fluency in the grammar of gears and circuits and the logic of how physical things are made. Engineering became her second language.

In Silco's apartment, she built with whatever she could find. Scraps from the hardware store down the street, discarded electronics from the recycling bins behind the appliance shop on the corner, materials scavenged from the industrial detritus that littered Zaun's streets the way fallen leaves littered parks in other cities. She built small things at first, circuits and mechanisms and crude mechanical devices that served no purpose beyond the purpose of having been built, but that gave her something she couldn't find anywhere else in her life: control. When she built something, she decided how it worked. She decided what it did. The laws of physics were consistent and predictable and they didn't change their rules based on where you lived or whether you were sleeping or whether your door had a lock.

At fifteen, Jinx built a lock.

It took her two days. She engineered it from a combination of a salvaged deadbolt mechanism, a steel plate she cut and shaped in the school's industrial arts room after hours, and a mounting system she designed herself to work with the specific dimensions of her bedroom door frame. The lock was robust, mechanical, and completely functional. It engaged from the inside with a sliding bolt that seated into a steel-reinforced strike plate, and it was strong enough that forcing it open would require more effort than the thin door itself could withstand, meaning that anyone trying to get through would have to go through the door rather than the lock, and the noise of doing so would wake the entire building.

She installed it on a Saturday afternoon while Silco was out. She screwed the plates into the frame and the door with borrowed tools and tested it seventeen times, locking and unlocking, locking and unlocking, until the motion was smooth and certain and the bolt seated with a solid, metallic click that was the most satisfying sound she had ever produced.

That night, for the first time in two years, she locked her door.

She lay in bed and she listened to the silence of the apartment and she heard, sometime after midnight, the soft sound of footsteps in the hallway. The footsteps stopped outside her door. The knob turned, the way it always did. But this time, the door didn't open.

The knob turned again, more firmly this time. The door held.

The knob reset and didn't move again. The seconds stretching out in the dark, Jinx lying in her bed with her eyes open and her heart pounding but something else in her chest too, something that wasn't cold and tight but warm and fierce and that felt, for the first time in a very long time, like power.

She heard the footsteps retreat.

Silco never mentioned the lock. He never asked about it, never commented on it, never requested that she remove it. Its presence was absorbed into the household.

Jinx kept the lock for the rest of her time in that apartment. She locked it every time she was in her room and she then made another lock, one for the bathroom, and locked it every time she used the bathroom. The cold, tight thing in her chest, which had been her constant companion for years, began slowly, to loosen.

It never went away entirely. Some things don't.

Zaun Preparatory High School was the kind of institution that the word "preparatory" had been attached to with either profound optimism or deliberate irony, because the thing it was primarily preparing its students for was a lifetime of navigating a world that had been designed to give them as little as possible and then blame them for not having enough. The building was a squat, rectangular structure of gray concrete that had been built in the seventies and hadn't been meaningfully maintained since, with a heating system that functioned only in the philosophical sense, windows that were either stuck open or sealed shut depending on the season you needed the opposite of, and a science department that operated on a budget that Jinx estimated, based on the equipment available, at somewhere in the neighborhood of a sincere prayer and whatever loose change had been found in the hallway.

Jinx didn't know anybody. She was small for her age, though she would grow a little more later, and her hair was a bright color, and she wore whatever clothes Silco provided, which were functional and plain and chosen without her input. She looked, to the casual observer, like exactly what she was: a kid from the system, unremarkable, one of dozens who moved through Zaun's public schools every year, present in the classroom but absent from the social ecosystem that surrounded it.

She didn't try to make friends. She had stopped trying somewhere around the third home, when the friend she had made at her second school didn't return her calls after the move and the lesson crystallized in her mind with permanent clarity of something learned through pain. Jinx learned to not invest in people who are going to leave, and people always leave, thus the logical extension was to not invest in people at all.

Her emotional intelligence may have been questionable, but her academic brain was not to be questioned.

This was not a secret, not really, but it was not something she advertised either, because being visibly smart in an underfunded school in an underserved district was a complicated proposition. It drew attention, and Jinx wasn't the fondest of this. She kept her head down in class. She did her work with a speed that could be mistaken for carelessness but that was actually the product of a mind that processed information several steps ahead of the lesson plan. She aced tests without studying and for Jinx, at least in math and science, didn't need to dedicate specific "study time".

Her science classes were where the thing inside her, the thing that built locks and built everything and anything, found its formal expression. Physics, chemistry, the basic engineering principles that were buried in the curriculum between mandated standardized test preparation and the teacher's daily struggle to maintain the attention of thirty teenagers in a room who could not care less. Jinx absorbed it all with hungry, unforgiving voracity of someone who had found the thing they were built for, and the absorption was visible to anyone who was paying attention, which, initially, was almost nobody.

She joined the science team in her sophomore year.

The Zaun Prep Science Team was a modest operation, six students and an advisor who taught chemistry during the day and coached the team after school with resigned dedication. They met twice a week in the chemistry lab, which doubled as a storage room for broken furniture, and they prepared for the regional academic competitions that the city held, competitions in which Zaun Prep historically placed somewhere between "not last" and "at least we showed up."

Jinx lasted three weeks on the team.

The problem was not her intelligence, which was immediately apparent to everyone on the team and which the advisor, Dr. Singed (old, oddly enthusiastic about science, but very unnerving most of the time), recognized as exceptional from the first meeting. The problem was everything else. Jinx was fifteen and carrying the accumulated weight of a childhood that had taught her to be defensive and solitary and sharp in ways that were not conducive to collaborative teamwork. She argued with the other students. She dismissed ideas she considered inferior, which was most of them, with a bluntness that was honest and not kind. She took over projects without being asked, not out of malice but out of the genuine inability to watch someone do something slowly and incorrectly when she could do it quickly and correctly. She was, in the assessment of the team captain, a junior named Claggor who was patient in ways that Jinx was not, "the smartest person in the room and also the hardest person in the room to be in a room with."

She was asked to leave.

So Jinx left without argument. She had expected it, the way she always expected the ending of things, because everything with an ounce of good in her life ended and the only variable was timing. She went back to building alone, in her room, behind her locked door, and she told herself she didn't care, and the telling was almost convincing.

Then the regional competition came around, and the team was down a member.

Claggor had transferred schools. His family had moved to the upper city, one of the rare upward transitions that happened just frequently enough to give Zaun's residents something to aspire to, and his departure left the team at five members, one short of the minimum required to compete. Dr. Singed approached Jinx in the hallway one afternoon, two weeks before the competition.

"Powder, how would you like to compete?" he asked simply.

"On the team I was kicked out of?"

"It was a decision the team made, that they believed was for the good of them. I did not advise it, but it was not my choice ultimately."

"Yeah, whatever."

"One competition," Dr. Singed continued. "Help the team compete."

And for whatever reason, maybe because she truly enjoyed it, maybe because she had something to prove to someone, Jinx was in.

The competition was held at a high school in the upper city, a building that made Zaun Prep look like a tool shed by comparison, and the Zaun Prep team arrived in a van that the school had borrowed from the custodial department and that smelled accordingly. They looked outmatched. The other teams, from schools with actual budgets and actual equipment and students who had been preparing for months, looked at the Zaun team with politely dismissive expressions that people from the upper city reserved for Zaun, and Jinx recognized those expressions because she had been seeing versions of them her entire life.

Jinx competed with a cold, focused precision that surprised even her. The individual events, the problem-solving challenges and the engineering tasks and the theoretical physics questions that the competition format demanded, were the kind of things that Jinx's brain had been doing recreationally since she was old enough to hold a screwdriver. She moved through them with extraordinary efficiency and the other teams, who had expected the Zaun school to provide easy early-round victories, found themselves watching their scores disappear under the weight of a fifteen-year-old girl who took things apart and put them back together the way other people breathed.

Zaun Prep won. It wasn't even close.

The ride home in the custodial van was loud and celebratory, the team members high on the unlikely victory and the validation it represented, and Dr. Singed drove with a knowing grin that hadn't left his face since Jinx agreed to compete. The other team members thanked Jinx with a warmth that was genuine and that she didn't quite know how to receive.

Yet, Jinx didn't go back to the team. They invited her back, apologized, but she rejected the offer. The reasons she gave were vague and unconvincing, something about her schedule and her workload and the implication that she had better things to do, but the real reason was simpler and sadder than any excuse she offered.

So Jinx was one and done, but that one competition left a mark on her transcript, a first-place finish in a regional science competition that sat on her academic record like a flare in the dark.

Her senior year quantum physics teacher was named Ms. Mel. She was very young for a teacher, definitely graduated early, but she had authority in the classroom that came not from strictness but from competence, the particular influence of someone who knows their subject deeply and everyone could tell. She had transferred to Zaun Prep from a school in the upper city, a move that the other teachers found either admirable or baffling, and she taught the class with conviction that every student in her class was capable of learning and becoming proficient.

Ms. Mel noticed Jinx the way Dr. Singed had, through the unmistakable evidence of a mind that operated on a different frequency than everyone else.

One day, she called Jinx to her desk after class in September of senior year, when the college application season was in full peak and the guidance counselors were herding students with the pretense of care.

"Have you thought about university?" Ms. Mel questioned.

Jinx, standing in front of the desk with her backpack hanging off one shoulder, gave her a look that conveyed, without words, the absurdity of the question. University was something that happened to other people, people from the upper city, people with families that had money and connections and the kind of stable home environments that produced college-ready applicants.

"No," Jinx shrugged.

"You should. There's a STEM scholarship at Piltover University. It's competitive, but your competition score alone would put you in serious contention, and your grades in physics and math are the highest in the school."

"I can't afford the application fee."

"The scholarship waives the fee. All you need is the application and an essay."

Jinx stood there for a moment, processing this information with the part of her brain that was good at processing information, and this part of her brain that was good at processing information was immediately overridden by the part of her brain that was good at protecting her from disappointment, maybe a bit too good at it.

"I'll think about it," Jinx answered, leaving her true thoughts unknown.

That night when she went home, she ate dinner and ignored Silco. Later, she locked her door and lay in her bed and she did not think about the scholarship because thinking about it meant wanting it.

But she couldn't stop her brain from working relentlessly without her permission, and the scholarship information that Ms. Mel had given her, the printed-out webpage with the deadline and the requirements and the essay prompt, sat on her dresser where she'd put it when she emptied her backpack, and it was there in the morning when she woke up and it was there in the evening when she went to bed and it was there every time she looked in that direction, a small, rectangular reminder of a possibility she was trying very hard not to want.

She tried to throw it away. She actually picked it up, on a Wednesday night about a week before the deadline, and she carried it to the small trash can in the corner of her room and she held it over the opening and she was about to let it drop when something stopped her.

It wasn't a thought, exactly, but a voice. A memory of a voice, specific and clear, preserved in her mind like a recording.

Vi's voice. Vi's face, young and fierce, leaning in close: "You're the smartest person I know, Pow. You're gonna do great things."

Jinx stood in her small room with the scholarship application held over the trash can and Vi's voice in her head and the weight of a belief someone held in her long ago pressing on her chest, and she pulled the paper back.

She sat down on her bed. She pulled out a notebook and a pen. And she wrote.

She wrote the essay in one night. She started at ten p.m. and she finished at four in the morning and she didn't stop in between, the words pouring out of her with a velocity and a clarity that felt almost involuntary. She wrote about her experience building things. She wrote about the lock, avoiding the exact details, but included the essence of it, the discovery that understanding how things worked gave you the power to change them, to make them better, to protect yourself in a world that was not designed to protect you. She wrote about physics and engineering and the moment during the competition when a theoretical problem she'd been given, something about structural loads and material stress, had clicked into place in her mind and she had known, with absolute conviction, that this was the thing she was supposed to do with her life.

She submitted the application.

She got the scholarship.

The letter came in March, on a day that was gray and cold and ordinary in every way except the way it ended. She opened it standing in the hallway of the apartment, halfway between Silco's room and hers, and she read it twice because the first time the words didn't seem to apply to her, seemed to be addressed to someone else, some other Powder who lived a better life, and then she read it a second time and the words themselves said a truth she couldn't deny.

Full scholarship. Tuition, room, food, and board. Piltover University, Department of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

It was her way out.

Silco said congratulations. He said it with his careful, measured warmth, and his dark, asymmetrical eyes watched her while he said it, and Jinx thought she saw something in them that she hadn't seen before, something that looked like loss and pride wound together.

Jinx packed her things last minute in August. She took a backpack and a duffel bag and the few possessions she had accumulated over the years, the tools and the salvaged electronics and the small mechanical devices she had built, and she left the apartment on the fourth floor of the building in the Lanes and she walked to the bus station and she took a bus across the city to Piltover University and she did not look back.

She did not look back because looking back would mean acknowledging that the place she was leaving had been, in its terrible, complicated, insufficient way, the closest thing to a home she had known since Vi, and that the man she was leaving had been, in his terrible, complicated, horrible way, the closest thing to a father, and both of those truths were things she could hold only at a distance.

She was eighteen now. She was free. She was going to university on a full scholarship and she was going to do great things because Vi said she would, even if Vi wasn't here now to see her do so.

Piltover University was everything that Zaun was not.

It was clean and it was so very bright. It was populated by people who had never had to share a bed with someone they didn't trust, didn't know, and who had never had to build a lock to feel safe in their own room and who walked through the world with easy, unconscious confidence. These were people for whom the basic conditions of safety and stability had always been provided. The campus was beautiful, nearly aggressively so, all green spaces and modern architecture and pathways designed for aesthetic enjoyment, and Jinx moved through it in the first weeks with hypervigilant awareness that came from being someone who had been placed in an environment so different from everything they had ever known.

Her dorm was assigned in the Eastside Residential Hall. Her roommate, according to her housing assignment sheet emailed to her that she glanced over once, was someone named Luxanna Crownguard, and the name alone communicated a class of person that Jinx had no experience with and no framework for engaging. The name alone sounded heavily pretentious and rich, someone with old money and had grown up with everything she ever wanted.

Jinx arrived late deliberately. She timed her move-in to coincide with orientation sessions she had no intention of attending, ensuring that the dorm would be empty when she brought her bags in and that the introduction she was dreading could be indefinitely postponed. She carried her duffel bag and her backpack up the stairs and down the hallway and into the suite, and she registered, briefly, the evidence of her roommate's prior arrival.

Jinx went into her room. She closed the door. She sat on the bed and she looked at the closed door.

Then she put on her headphones and she played music loud enough to not hear the knock that came an hour later, though she saw, through the crack under the door, the shadow of feet and heard, faintly beneath the bass, a voice introducing itself to a closed door.

She did not respond.

It was not intended to be rudeness, though it would look like rudeness, and it would feel like rudeness to the girl on the other side of the door, the girl whose name was Luxanna and who had probably been raised to introduce herself to people with a smile and a handshake.

Jinx established her schedule around avoidance. Afternoon and night classes. Late-night workshop and lab hours. A sleep pattern that was impressively asynchronous with the rest of the campus. She ate at odd hours, stocking the mini fridge with energy drinks that served as both sustenance and the chemical fuel her brain required to operate. She left early or she left late or she didn't leave at all, and the girl in the other room, this Luxanna Crownguard, became a concept rather than a person, a presence Jinx was aware of but never confronted, a set of evidence such as the neatly labeled containers in the fridge, the faint sound of an alarm clock through the wall, the welcome card that appeared on the counter, cheerful and earnest and bearing the kind of sentiment that Jinx didn't know how to receive.

She moved the card without a thought. She picked it up and looked at it and she put it back down a few inches to the left and she went into her room and closed the door, and the card sat on the counter in its new position.

The first semester passed in a blur of various STEM courses Jinx never had the opportunity to even consider in her under-paid high school and workshop hours. She was good at these subjects like she was a musician and those were her instruments. And she played naturally and constantly and without the ability to stop.

Professor Viktor recognized it in the first week of his Advanced Robotics seminar, looking at her initial project proposal with intrigue.

"This is exceptional work," he complimented in his accented voice, turning the proposal over in his hands. "Who taught you structural analysis at this level?"

"Nobody," Jinx told him honestly.

Viktor looked at her over the top of the proposal. His eyes were sharp and measuring and reminded her, uncomfortably, of Silco's in a way, but the similarity ended at the surface because what lived behind Viktor's assessment was something with genuine warmth.

"You are a prodigy... possibly a truly exceptional autodidact," Viktor declared. "I expect your best, Miss Powder, and I believe your best has a ceiling you haven't found yet and I'd like to help you look for it."

Jinx blinked. Nobody had ever said anything like that to her. Ms. Mel had come close, but it wasn't quite the same. Viktor was different. Viktor spoke to her like a colleague, like an equal, like someone whose intelligence he respected enough to challenge, despite their present differences in education and degrees.

And so Jinx gave him her best. She gave him more than her best. She spent hours in the workshop that would have been concerning if anyone had been tracking them, which nobody was, because nobody was close enough to Jinx to care. In that workshop, she built many things. She built robots that moved and responded and learned, crude at first, then increasingly sophisticated, the iterative process of design and failure and redesign and success that is the fundamental rhythm of engineering, the heartbeat of making. She built a drone with personality, a phrase she used to describe the project to anyone who asked because the technical description, an autonomous aerial vehicle with adaptive behavioral algorithms based on environmental stimulus response, felt like it didn't capture the thing she was actually trying to do, which was to build something that was alive.

She was happy in the workshop. That was the truth of it, the simple, unglamorous truth. The workshop, with its tools and its workbenches and its smell of metal and solder and the particular ozone tang of overheated electronics, was the first place since Vi's arms that Jinx had felt truly safe. It was a place where the only rules were physics and the currency was competence and nobody watched her through open doors or stood in doorways at night or commented on the way her body was changing. It was a place where the thing she was, the thing inside her that built and dismantled and understood, was valued rather than feared or exploited. It was a place where she could wear a welding mask and be invisible and produce work that was visible, and the exchange, anonymity for achievement, was one she would have made forever.

She wore the mask more than she needed to. She knew this. The welding mask was necessary for actual welding, obviously, but she wore it outside the workshop too, pushed up on her head like a headband or pulled down over her face when she walked through campus, and the reason was the same reason she had built the lock and established the avoidance schedule and maintained the ghost roommate status for an entire semester: it was a barrier. A boundary. A physical thing between her face and the world that said don't look at me, or rather, look at me and see the mask and not the person beneath it, because the person beneath it is someone who was looked at by someone who should not have been looking and the residue of that looking had not fully come off yet.

When the first semester ended, Jinx reluctantly went home, or rather, she went to Silco's apartment, because it was the only address she had and the dorms closed and she didn't have a valid reason according to Residential Life to stay on campus. She spent almost a month back in Zaun, sleeping behind her lock, eating meals she prepared herself because Silco's cooking was an extension of his control and she had learned, over the years, to minimize as much as she could, his influence on her. She exchanged the minimum required pleasantries with him. She ignored his questions about school and deflected his observations about how much she'd changed with the same flat, practiced responses she'd been using since she was twelve. She spoke, more often than not, in one word sentences only.

She was more than ecstatic to go back to school.

And then the sticky note appeared.

Hope you have a good day!

Sincerely,

Lux

Jinx found it at three in the morning.

She had just come back from the workshop, her overalls stained with something that was either grease or toner, she wasn't sure and didn't care, and she was headed for the mini fridge to grab an energy drink. The common room was dark and quiet, the way it always was at this hour, and the sticky note on the fridge was a small, bright yellow square that stood out even in the darkness of the room.

She read it standing there, her quest for a drink entirely forgotten.

Hope you have a good day!

Sincerely,

Lux

Jinx read it six times.

It was such a small thing. It was a tiny, cheap note, and a handful of inconsequential words. A sentiment so generic it could have come from anyone and been directed at anyone and it would have been equally unremarkable.

Have a good day. The kind of thing you say to a cashier or a coworker or a stranger holding a door, reflexive and meaningless, a social nicety filed under the broad category of things people say only because the alternative, saying nothing, feels worse.

But in this case, it didn't feel generic. Rather, it was specific because it was stuck to the fridge that Jinx used, placed there because Lux knew that Jinx used the fridge, knew that she would see the note, placed there by a person who had calculated that this was the best place to put it because this was the only point of contact between them, the only place where their otherwise entirely separate lives intersected. It was specific because it was signed with her name, Lux, a piece of identity placed in the space between them like a hand extended for shaking. It was specific because someone had thought about Jinx, had taken the time to think about her and then gone on to act on that thought, had gone to the effort of pulling a sticky note from a pad and uncapping a pen and writing words and pressing the note to a surface, all of it directed at Jinx, for Jinx.

Yeah, maybe it was just a small thing really. But nobody did things like this for her.

Jinx stood in the dark. She looked at the yellow square on the fridge door and she thought about her options.

One, she could ignore it. This was the default. Ignore it the way she had ignored the knock and the welcome card, let it sit there and eventually fall off or Lux would take it off and it would become just another piece of evidence that the girl in the other room had tried and Jinx had declined.

Two, Jinx could respond.

The second option was terrifying while the first was not, because responding meant engaging and engaging meant opening herself up, even just a little bit. Responding meant acknowledging that she existed, that she was here, that she was a person who could be communicated with, and the acknowledgment created the possibility of continuation, which created the possibility of investment, which created the possibility of loss.

But the note was so kind. The note was so simple and so kind and so small and it asked for nothing, it demanded nothing, it said have a good day and it meant it, and Jinx realized, standing there in the dark at three in the morning with the residue of solder on her fingers, that she wanted, for the first time in a very long time, to respond to this kindness with something other than silence.

She tore a piece of graph paper from the notebook in her bag. She found a pen. She wrote two words: u too

She stuck it beneath the yellow note and she went to bed and she lay there for a long time, staring at the ceiling, and the thing in her chest was not cold and tight but warm and uncertain, the smallest possible beginning of something she didn't have a name for yet.

The notes changed things in more ways than Jinx expected.

They changed things slowly, the way erosion changes a landscape, incrementally and by the time Jinx realized how much had changed she was already too deep into it to pretend otherwise. The mutual correspondence that began with two words on graph paper grew into something that occupied a central, structural position in her daily life, an element that she had incorporated into her routine without conscious intention and that she now relied on with a dependency that frightened her.

She thought about Lux, which was new, but also understandable now.

She thought about Lux maybe a little too much, and the constancy of it was the frightening part, because Jinx's brain was a machine that ran on obsession, that latched onto things with all-consuming intensity of a spotlight and that had historically directed that intensity toward engineering problems and robotics projects. Turning that intensity toward a person was new. Turning it toward a person she had never seen was newer still, and the combination of intensity and absence created a condition that Jinx would have called infatuation if she'd been willing to use the word, which she wasn't.

She read Lux's notes carefully, thoroughly, multiple times, extracting every piece of available information and constructing from it a mental model of the person on the other side of the common room. She learned that Lux was bright, and the word applied in multiple senses, bright as in intelligent and bright as in luminous, a person who radiated warmth through written words alone the way the sun radiates heat through vacuum. She learned that Lux was genuinely kind, not in a performative way that people are kind when they want something in return but Lux was truly kind, considerate, a better person than Jinx. She learned that Lux was funny and it contrasted with Jinx's own humor, which was sharp and absurdist and defensive, and the contrast was part of what made the notes work, the two styles bouncing off each other and creating something that was better together.

She learned that Lux was lonely.

This was not something Lux said explicitly, not in so many words, but it was there in the notes, encoded in the spaces between the sentences, in the way Lux wrote about her family and her mother's expectations and the feeling of being forced to live a version of yourself that someone else had written and decided without your input. Jinx recognized the loneliness and the recognition created a bridge between them that was different from the one built by humor or by the exchange of favorite colors and foods. It was a bridge built on shared damage, the understanding that passes between two people who have both been hurt by the world, albeit in different ways, and who have both learned to hide the hurting behind walls that look very different from the outside but that serve the same purpose from the inside.

Jinx wrote things in those notes that she had never said to another living person.

She wrote about her brain, constantly on and wired. Surprising herself, she even wrote about Vi, briefly. She wrote about the workshop and about Viktor and about the flamethrower Roomba that Viktor had rejected with a look of such profound exhaustion that almost made Jinx feel actual shame. Almost.

Jinx drew things. She drew the Roomba and the stick-figure self-portrait and tiny bombs and skulls and smiley faces that decorated her notes, because drawing was easier than writing sometimes, the way that constructing something was easier than talking, and the drawings were another form of communication. They showed more about Jinx to Lux than she knew.

Lux kept some of the notes. Jinx didn't know this at first, but she figured it out because Lux mentioned, in a note, that the Roomba drawing was on my corkboard now and the mention was casual and offhand and Jinx read it four times and felt something in her chest that was growing and terrifying.

Then, the monkey appeared.

Jinx came home at two in the morning and there it was, sitting on top of the fridge with a note stuck to its belly, this small, brown, lopsided stuffed animal with wide stitched eyes and a face that looked like it couldn't believe its own existence. And all the note said: Saw this and thought of you! His name is up to you. —Lux

Jinx stood in the common room and held the monkey and she read the note and she felt something crack inside her chest, the way ice cracks in spring when the water beneath it begins to warm, a structural failure that is also a beginning, the first change in a surface that has been frozen for a very long time.

She thought of me.

Lux had been in a store somewhere, surely doing normal things with normal friends, living her normal, bright, full life, and she saw a monkey and she thought of Jinx. She thought of a girl she'd never seen and never audibly spoken to, thought of her because Jinx had mentioned, in a note that she liked monkeys, and Lux had remembered. Lux had remembered and she had bought the monkey and she had carried it back to the dorm and placed it on the fridge and written a note and the entire chain of actions, from the remembering to the buying to the placing to the writing, was motivated by nothing more than the desire to do something nice for Jinx.

Jinx named him Kiki Thunderfist III. She put him on her desk where she could see him while she worked. And she wrote a response that was longer than anything she'd written before, a note that cracked open a little more of the ice and let something warm and rushing pour through, and the note revealed things like nobody really does stuff like that for me and the notes are my favorite part of the day and she signed it with a P to match Lux's signature and because she was partly still Powder then, still the name from the system, still carrying the old skin that she would eventually shed.

The night she met Lux in person, Jinx was coming back from the workshop at two in the morning. She opened the suite door and moved through the dark common room the way she always did, by feel and by memory, and she reached the fridge and opened it and the light flooded out and she heard a voice from the couch, hoarse and slurred and full of a wonder that was so genuine it couldn't possibly be performed:

"Are you a biblically accurate angel?"

Jinx had never laughed like that before. The laugh was pulled out of her by surprise, a shining, sharp, involuntary sound that she heard from outside herself and that sounded, to her own ears, like someone she didn't recognize, someone who used to laughing easily and freely.

She looked at the girl on the couch. Drunk, disheveled, one arm hanging off the cushion and her clothes wrinkled and her eyes bleary and unfocused and looking at Jinx with an expression of pure, unfiltered astonishment, as though Jinx was the most extraordinary thing she had ever seen, and the look was so naked and so overwhelming that Jinx felt it land on her like it had a physical force, like heat, like the sun coming through the clouds after a long winter.

Jinx helped Lux to bed. She took off her shoes because Lux was too drunk to manage it and because the gesture came naturally, without calculation, the instinct to take care of someone who needed taking care of, and as she knelt on the floor and pulled off the shoes one at a time she thought about Vi, who had done this for her when she was small, who had knelt beside and untied her shoes and pulled them off and said "there you go, Pow" and the memory hurt and healed in equal measure.

Lux called her beautiful.

She said it plainly, without caveat, without the performance of flattery or the social machinery of compliment-giving, just a simple declarative statement delivered with the earnest conviction of someone who was too drunk to be anything other than honest.

Jinx didn't know what to do with that. She stood in the doorway of Lux's bedroom and she looked at the girl on the bed, this girl she had been communicating with through sticky notes for weeks, this girl whose handwriting she could identify at a glance and whose voice she was hearing for the first time, and she didn't know what to do with the fact that this girl, this bright, warm, kind girl who bought stuffed monkeys for her and left notes on fridges for her and signed them with her name like letters, thought she was beautiful.

"You're not so bad yourself, bright eyes," Jinx finally said and she pulled the door closed, and she went to her room and she sat on her bed and she pressed her hands to her face and she breathed and she thought about what was happening to her and whether she could stop it and whether she wanted to.

She decided she didn't want to stop it. That was the answer she arrived at somewhere around four in the morning, lying in the dark with Kiki Thunderfist III on the desk beside her. She didn't want to stop whatever this was, this warming, this cracking, this slow and terrifying opening of something that had been closed for a very long time.

Jinx was scared. She was so scared that the fear was a taste in her mouth and a weight on her chest and a tremor in her hands. But she had been scared before, many times, in many ways, and she had survived every single one of them, and this fear, the fear of being seen, the fear of being known, the fear of being close to someone who might matter, felt different from the others. It felt like the fear you feel at the top of a roller coaster about to drop, the fear that is also exhilaration, the fear that is also the beginning of flight.

Soon after, she told Lux to call her Jinx. She signed the note with a J and she drew a face with its tongue sticking out and she shed the old name like the old skin it was and she stepped into the new one and it fit, the way the right tool fits in her hand.

During and after spring break, everything changed more than Jinx ever thought they could.

Jinx did not have language for what the trip to Demacia had done to the space between her and Lux. What had happened was the collapse of distance and there was no word that correctly represented this. They had grown close before, through the notes, through the fridge, but the closeness had been mediated, filtered through pen and paper, held at the specific distance that written communication imposes by its nature. Demacia removed the filter. Demacia put them in the same rooms and the same cars and the same conversations with no fridge between them and no paper and no option to edit or revise or reconsider before responding, and what Jinx discovered, in the unmediated reality of Lux's physical presence, was that she liked her even more than she had imagined, and she had imagined a lot.

She liked the way Lux's voice sounded when she was talking about something she cared about, how it went higher and faster and the words tumbled over each other in their hurry to get out. She liked the way Lux moved through her own home, which was a mansion (literally a castle) with the apology of someone who was embarrassed by their privilege and wanted you to know they hadn't chosen it. She liked the way Lux's hand felt when she guided her through the house, comforting and light and gone too quickly. She liked Garen, who was enormous and kind and who treated Jinx like a person and who asked if they were dating with zero subtlety.

She liked how Lux blushed when Garen asked. She liked how the pink spread across Lux's cheeks and down her neck and how her voice went thin and high when she denied it. She liked how Garen looked like he didn't completely believe the denial. She liked all of it and more and the liking terrified her and she kept liking things anyway.

And then, that gala, she met Vi again.

The gala, the white dress, the ballroom, and then a champagne glass shattering and a woman with pink hair crossing the room and the word "Powder" spoken in a voice that Jinx hadn't heard in ten years but that she would have recognized in a crowd of thousands, in a storm, in the dark.

Jinx didn't remember the details of what happened next, not in any orderly narrative. She remembered fragments. The feel of Vi's arms around her, strong and desperate and smelling like the cologne of the suit she was wearing and something underneath that was just Vi, unchanged by time, the same scent that lived in Jinx's earliest memories of safety. The sound of Vi's voice cracking on her name. The wetness of tears on her own face and on Vi's neck and the dark spot they left on the jacket of Vi's suit. The words that came out of both of them, jumbled and raw, ten years of words stored up and released in a flood that had no structure and needed none because the words were not the point, the contact was the point, the physical proof that the other person was real and present and here.

She remembered standing in the garden afterward, barefoot and wrecked, looking up at stars that looked nothing like Zaun's stars because Demacia's sky was cleaner and the light pollution was less and the constellations were the same but seemed different when you were looking at them from a different place with a different perspective.

She remembered Lux finding her there. The sound of her approaching on the garden path, giving Jinx the choice of whether to be found, and Jinx choosing it, turning to face her, and seeing in Lux's face an expression that was many things at once, concern and warmth and the raw, undisguised evidence of caring about what happened to Jinx so much that it had become visible on the surface, and the visibility of it, the willingness to show it, was what finally broke the last of the ice.

She told Lux things in the garden. She thanked her for the notes and what they really meant to her. She apologized for her being the ghost roommate and tried to explain, tried to make some sense of it that now seemed ridiculous to her. She confessed to Lux that she was worth trying for, and Lux only proved that more when she took Jinx to her private family library and to the carnival and Jinx just had to win her something, and of course she chose a butterfly because Lux mentioned she liked them.

Then there were the touches that started populating.

Back on campus, back in the dorm, back in the life they had built together through numerous notes and conversations and the accumulated evidence of caring, the space between their bodies narrowed. Jinx didn't plan it. She didn't strategize or calculate or decide to start touching Lux more frequently and more intimately. It happened instinctively, the body following a logic that the conscious mind hadn't caught up with yet. She rested her head against Lux's knee during game night because Lux's knee was there and it was warm and her head was tired and it felt right. She looped her arm through Lux's on the quad because walking next to Lux without touching her felt like an incomplete circuit, like a wire that was almost connected to its terminal but not quite, and the almost was unbearable. She hooked her fingers through Lux's belt loops and spun her around because she wanted to see Lux's face, wanted the front of her instead of the back, wanted those eyes, and the wanting was so natural and so strong that acting on it required less effort than resisting it.

Jinx knew what was happening. She wasn't as oblivious as she pretended, wasn't as unaware as the casual bravado suggested. She knew that the way she touched Lux was different from the way she touched anyone else, which was to say that she touched Lux at all, which was to say that Lux had become the exception to every rule Jinx had ever built around herself, every wall and every lock and every protocol of distance and avoidance, and the exceptions were multiplying daily and Jinx was letting them.

She was letting them because Lux was safe.

This was the thing she kept coming back to, the fundamental, truth that held the whole structure together: Lux was safe. Lux had seen Jinx messy and vulnerable and crying in a garden, and she hadn't left. She'd come closer. She'd held on tighter. And when she did, the part of Jinx that had been taught to expect the opposite, the part shaped by years bouncing from home to home and then landing in Silco's apartment and the open doors and the years of watching and being watched, grew a little smaller and a little quieter.

She still heard it, though. In the moments between the laughter and the touching and the texts and the notes, in the quiet moments when she was alone in her room with Kiki Thunderfist III, she heard the voice that said: this won't last. You don't deserve this. She'll go eventually.

She heard it, and Jinx ignored it.

And then Lux asked her to come to Jayce's party and Jinx said yes and she spent forty-five minutes in the bathroom trying to get her eyeliner right because she wanted to look good and the wanting had a specific direction that she could no longer pretend was general. She wanted to look good for Lux. She chose the crop top because it showed her tattoos and she knew Lux looked at her tattoos. She chose the low pants because they made her feel confident and confidence was the armor she wore when the welding mask wasn't an option. She did her makeup with the same carefulness and thought she used when making a fully functioning robot from scratch, and she looked at herself in the mirror and she saw, for the first time in a long time, someone she liked looking at.

She arrived at the party and Lux found her within seconds, appearing at her side with a brightness that was at least partially proprietary, the body language of someone claiming proximity, and Jinx registered this and liked it and let herself be claimed.

They danced. God, they danced. The party was loud and dark and Lux was warm against her and Lux's hands were on her and her hands were on Lux and the distance between their bodies, which had been narrowing for weeks, reached zero and then went past it, entering negative space, and the music was a heartbeat and the colored lights were a fever dream and Jinx thought, this is the edge. This is the cliff. This is the place where you either jump or you don't.

And then the bathroom. The muffled noise. Lux standing at the sink looking pale and then turning around and looking at Jinx and Jinx looked at her and the room was very small and the air was very thick and Lux's eyes were very dark and Jinx's eyes were doing the thing they did when they looked at Lux's mouth, which was drop, involuntarily, repeatedly, the way a compass needle drops toward north.

Lux crossed the distance and kissed her.

Jinx felt Lux's hands on her waist, warm and sure and gripping bare skin with firmness that said something to Jinx. She felt Lux's mouth on hers, soft and then less soft, tentative for exactly zero seconds before becoming something else, something that matched the force of everything that had been building between them and that was finally, finally, finally being expressed in the only language left, the language of skin and breath and the small sound that came out of Jinx's own throat against her will, a sound she had never made before and that she heard from outside herself and that sounded like someone she didn't recognize, someone who was wanted and who was allowing herself to be.

She felt Lux's fingers in her hair.

She felt her own hand on the back of Lux's neck.

She felt the door solid against her back and Lux's body solid against her front and the space between these two solidities was the most alive she had ever been.

And then someone knocked, and the spell broke, and Jinx ran.

She ran because that was what she did. She ran because the feeling was too big and too much and too new and the part of her that had been shaped by Silco's apartment and the years of surviving by keeping distance was screaming at her that this was dangerous, that wanting someone this much was the most dangerous thing she had ever done, more dangerous than the shared bed and the unlocked doors and the watching in the night, because those things had been done to her and she had survived them through endurance, but this, this thing with Lux, she was choosing herself.

Jinx went back to the dorm. She closed her bedroom door fully. She changed out of the crop top and the pants and she put on a t-shirt and shorts and she washed the makeup off her face and she looked at herself in the small mirror above her dresser and she saw someone she recognized again, the girl from Zaun, the foster kid, the ghost roommate, the person who built locks instead of trying to build a bridge between her and someone else.

She took more melatonin than she should have, a handful of gummies consumed in quick succession, because sleep was the only escape from the thoughts that were running through her head in loops, the feeling of Lux's mouth on hers and the sound she had made and the taste of Lux's lipstick and the way Lux's hands had felt and the knock on the door and the look on Lux's face when they broke apart and the walk through the hallway and the cold air and the distance growing between them with every step and every step feeling like a mistake.

She crashed. She fell into a sleep that was more a chemical shutdown, the melatonin dragging her under like a riptide, and the last thought she had before consciousness left was: I am going to have to deal with this tomorrow.

Tomorrow was inexplicably, shockingly, so much worse.

The phone rang at eleven-thirty in the morning.

Jinx surfaced from her haze slowly and painfully, her mouth dry and her head thick and her eyes clouded with residual sleep. The ringtone was the default one, the generic trill she'd never bothered to change, and it took her several seconds to locate the phone on her dresser and several more to focus on the screen well enough to read the number.

The number was from Zaun. The area code was unmistakable, and the contact name was one she hadn't seen on her incoming calls in months.

Silco.

Jinx stared at the phone. The ringing continued, insistent and mechanical, and she stared at it and her hand didn't move and her brain was running calculations, calculations about risk and reward and the cost of engagement.

Silco didn't call. This was established protocol, an unspoken agreement that had existed between them since Jinx left for university. They texted occasionally, the bare minimum of contact that the relationship required, messages that were perfunctory and impersonal.

How are classes?

fine

Do you need anything?

no

The texts were a formality, a thin thread of communication maintained not out of affection but out of the complicated obligation that exists between a child and the person who housed them, the acknowledgment that the relationship existed even if neither party particularly wanted to examine what it was.

But Silco never called. This calling meant something. This calling broke their protocol. The calling meant that something had happened that couldn't be contained in a text, and the list of things that fell into that category was short and the possibilities it contained were uniformly bad.

Jinx picked up.

"Hello?" Her voice was rough from sleep.

"Powder."

His voice was the same and different. The same measured cadence, the same careful diction, the same low register that had once made her skin crawl. But it was different too, thinner, with a quality she hadn't heard before, a fragility.

"What's going on?" Jinx asked immediately, and the directness was intentional, a refusal to engage in pleasantries with a man she had spent years learning to keep at the precise distance that allowed for coexistence without intimacy.

"I'm in the hospital."

The words landed in her chest with a weight that was disproportionate to their simplicity. Four words. Subject, verb, location. A basic sentence that rearranged the shape of her morning and the week and potentially everything that came after.

"What happened?"

"Heart attack last night. They're calling it a myocardial infarction with complications." He answered clinically, a man narrating his own medical emergency with the same detached calm he had used to narrate everything else. "The prognosis is not favorable."

"Not favorable meaning what?"

A pause. In the pause, Jinx heard the sounds of a hospital, the beeping of monitors and the distant murmur of voices. When Silco spoke again, the careful control in his voice had thinned, just slightly, just enough for something underneath to show through.

"Meaning I'm dying, Powder."

Jinx sat on the edge of her bed in her t-shirt and shorts, phone pressed to her ear, and she felt everything and nothing simultaneously. The everything was a storm, a chaotic, directionless swirl of emotions that contradicted each other and coexisted and refused to resolve into anything coherent: grief that was also relief, anger that was also guilt, love that was also revulsion, the entire tangled, impossible knot of feelings that accumulates when a person who has damaged you is also the person who kept you alive. The nothing was the numbness that arrived on the heels of the storm, the shutdown that her nervous system produced when the input exceeded the processing capacity, the same flat, gray blankness that had gotten her through the worst nights in the apartment and the worst days in the schools and every other moment when feeling was too expensive and the only affordable option was to feel nothing at all.

"Which hospital?" Jinx heard herself question, and her voice was flat and calm and came from somewhere outside the storm and the nothing.

He told her. Zaun General, on the lower east side, a building she had passed a hundred times without ever going inside.

"I'll come," Jinx hung up.

She didn't think about it. She didn't weigh the options or run the calculations or consult the carefully maintained system of distance and avoidance that had governed her relationship with Silco since she was old enough to understand what the relationship was. She just said it. And then she was moving, pulling on clothes, pulling on shoes, grabbing her phone and her wallet and nothing else, and she was out the door of her bedroom and through the common room and into the hallway without looking at the fridge, without leaving a note, without doing any of the things that had become her daily ritual, because the ritual belonged to a different version of the morning, the version in which her foster father wasn't dying in a hospital across the city.

She hailed a car on her phone and sat in the back seat and watched Piltover blur past the window, the clean, bright streets of the university district giving way to the industrial grayness of the lower city, the transition happening gradually and then all at once, the same way everything in her life seemed to happen.

Zaun General Hospital was a building that matched its name: general in the sense of unspecified, noncommittal, adequate in the way that public institutions in underserved districts are adequate, which is to say barely. The lobby was large and institutional, with fluorescent lighting that washed everyone and everything in the same flat, blue-white pallor, and the woman at the reception desk looked at Jinx with no emotion.

"I'm here to see a patient," Jinx said. "His name is Silco."

"Are you family?"

The question was simple and the answer was complicated and Jinx didn't have the energy for complicated so she gave the simple version.

"I'm his daughter," she answered, and the words came out of her mouth and they tasted strange, and the strangeness was that the words were both a lie and the truth, both an oversimplification and the most accurate description available.

She was given a room number and directions and she walked through hallways that smelled of antiseptic and floor wax. She found the room. The door was open. She stopped in the doorway.

He looked terrible.

This was not the kind of observation she would normally make about Silco, because Silco had never been a person whose appearance she spent time cataloguing. He was the man in the apartment, the presence at the kitchen table, the silhouette in the doorway at night. He was a set of behaviors and a voice and a pair of dark, asymmetrical eyes and a carefully maintained distance that was simultaneously too close and too far. He was not, in Jinx's mental architecture, a body, a physical thing that aged and weakened and broke down.

But here he was a body, and it was breaking down, and the evidence was impossible to ignore. He was thin, even thinner than she remembered, his frame reduced to something that looked almost skeletal beneath the hospital gown. His skin was gray, genuinely gray. The scar on his face looked more prominent against the pallor, a dark, puckered line that seemed to pull the surrounding skin into itself. Tubes and wires connected him to machines that beeped and hummed and displayed numbers that Jinx's brain automatically processed (heart rate low, blood pressure dropping, oxygen saturation borderline).

His eyes were open. The dark one and the clouded one, both fixed on the doorway, both fixed on her.

He smiled.

It was a true smile. This was uncontrolled, involuntary, the expression produced by a face that was too tired and too close to the end to bother with pretending. It was the smile of a man who was seeing someone he loved, and the love was real, and the realness of it was the cruelest thing about it, because the love did not cancel out the damage and the damage did not cancel out the love and the two things coexisted in the smile the way they coexisted in everything about their relationship, tangled and contradictory and impossible to resolve.

He opened his mouth to speak and the speaking became a cough, a deep, racking cough that bent him forward and made the machines behind him beep faster and that brought two nurses into the room within seconds, moving around him with urgency. They adjusted things. They pressed buttons and checked readings and one of them put a hand on his back, supporting him through the cough, and Jinx stood in the doorway and watched and didn't move.

The cough subsided. The nurses checked the machines, exchanged a look that communicated something between them that Jinx didn't need to interpret because the look was clear enough: this was not going to get better. They left, filing past Jinx in the doorway with brief, professional glances that acknowledged her presence without engaging it.

Silco settled back against the pillows. His breathing was shallow and labored and the effort of the cough had taken something out of him that he didn't have to spare.

"You came," his voice was barely a voice, reduced by the cough and the illness to something thin and wispy.

Jinx stood there and she looked at him. The storm and the nothing were both still present, occupying different parts of her simultaneously, and she didn't know which one to operate from.

"You don't have to stay," Silco managed out.

"I know." And she turned around. She turned, walked out of the room, and kept walking down the hallway and through the lobby and out the front entrance and into the daylight.

She stood on the sidewalk outside Zaun General Hospital and she breathed.

She came back the next day.

She didn't call first or ask permission or announce her intention. She just showed up, mid-morning, and she walked through the hallways and found the room and went in and sat down in the chair beside the bed.

Silco looked at her. She looked at him. The machines beeped their steady, mechanical rhythms. The room was quiet and small and smelled of antiseptic and something underneath the antiseptic that was organic and wrong, the smell of a body that was failing.

"I wasn't good to you," Silco admitted honestly.

The words came out of nowhere, or rather, they came from the same place that the smile had come from, the place that the nearness of death opens up in people, the stripped-down, unperformed honesty that arrives when time ran out.

Jinx's hands were in her lap. She looked at them. Her fingers, calloused, stained at the cuticles with permanent traces of the work she did, the work that had saved her, the work that had been, for years, the only safe place in her life. She looked at her hands and she thought about the lock she had built at fifteen and the door it protected and the silhouette that had stood in its frame before the lock existed.

"No," she agreed. "You weren't."

The silence after the exchange was long and heavy and full of things that neither of them had language for. Jinx sat in the chair and Silco lay in the bed and the machines beeped and the silence did the work that the words couldn't.

"I'm sorry, Powder," Silco stared straight up at the ceiling, not looking at her. "I'm sorry for everything I did and yet I don't regret the immensely strong, intelligent, capable individual you've become."

Jinx started crying. She didn't know when it had started, but the tears were there, hot and silent on her cheeks.

"You were the closest thing I had to a father," she said quietly, and the words were heavy and true and they cost her something that she would never get back. "I needed a father and you were a bad one. You were a bad one in ways that I'm still figuring out and that I might be figuring out for the rest of my life. But you were the only one I had."

Silco's eyes were wet. Both of them, the dark one and the clouded one, and the wetness made the clouded one look almost clear, almost whole, as though the tears were doing what medicine and time had not, restoring something that had been damaged.

"I know what I was. I know what I did and what I failed to do. And if I could go back and do it differently, I would. But I can't. The only thing I can give you now is the truth of it, which is that you deserved better and I failed you."

The crying was worse now, not silent anymore, the sobs rising from somewhere deep in Jinx's chest and breaking through the surface with a force that shook her whole body. She was crying for the twelve-year-old who had slept in a stranger's bed. She was crying for the thirteen-year-old who had pretended to be asleep when the door opened. She was crying for the fifteen-year-old who had built a lock because no one else would protect her. She was crying for all the years between then and now, the years of carrying the weight of something she had never been given permission to put down.

Silco raised his hand. It was thin and IV-threaded and trembling with the effort. He reached toward her face, and she flinched, the reflex automatic and old and rooted in the deepest part of her nervous system, and he stopped, his hand hovering in the air between them.

"Don't cry," he started, and his voice was barely a whisper now, the words dissolving at the edges. "You're perfect."

His hand dropped. His eyes closed. The heartrate monitor behind him shifted, the beeping slowing, the intervals between the sounds lengthening in a way that Jinx's brain processed and understood before her conscious mind caught up.

She stood. She stood so fast that the chair scraped across the floor and she shouted for the doctors, her voice raw and broken and loud in the small room, and the sound brought people running, a nurse first and then a doctor and then another, and they moved around the bed responding to the thing they had known was coming, adjusting and pressing and calling out numbers and doing all the things that medical training teaches you to do when a body is shutting down.

Jinx stood against the wall. She couldn't hear the voices or the commands or the beeping that was getting slower and farther apart. She could only hear the blood in her own ears and the sound of her own breathing, rapid and shallow and inadequate. She watched the monitor. She watched the line that tracked the heartbeat, the peaks and the valleys and the spaces between them, and she watched the peaks get smaller and the valleys get deeper and the spaces get wider.

She was on her knees. She didn't remember kneeling but she was on the floor now, her back against the wall and now her knees were drawn up and her hands over her mouth, and the doctors were still working and the monitor was still showing the line and the line was still moving.

Then it wasn't.

The line went flat and the beeping stopped. The silence that replaced it was absolute and total and leaving no space for anything else.

Jinx returned to the dorm.

She walked through the suite door and into the common room and across to her bedroom without stopping and without looking at the fridge. She closed her door.

She sat on her bed.

She sat there for a very long time.

The days that followed existed in a register that Jinx would later struggle to remember with any specificity, because the days were not individual, distinct units of time but rather a continuous, undifferentiated blur, a gray stretch of hours that she moved through on autopilot, present enough to function and absent enough to avoid feeling. She went to her exams. She sat in classrooms and she wrote in blue books and she answered questions about thermodynamics and materials science and structural analysis, and her brain produced the answers, the knowledge stored and accessible regardless of what was happening in the rest of her, and she finished each exam and walked out and returned to her room and closed the door and sat on her bed.

She did not leave notes. She did not check the fridge. She did not open her bedroom door.

She saw the texts from Lux. They accumulated on her phone's lock screen and Jinx looked at them and felt the combination of everything and nothing that had become her default emotional state, and she couldn't bring herself to respond. Responding required a version of herself that she couldn't currently access.

Lux's texts were careful at first, respectful of the distance that Jinx's silence established.

Hey, haven't heard from you. Hope you're doing okay. No pressure to respond.

Then more concerned.

Jinx, I'm worried about you. Just let me know you're alright? A thumbs up or anything.

Then:

If this is about what happened at the party, I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have done that without asking. Please talk to me.

Jinx read that one four times and felt something sharp and hot move through the numbness, because Lux thought this was about the kiss, Lux thought that her silence was a response to what had happened in the bathroom, and the misunderstanding was painful because it meant Lux was blaming herself for something that wasn't her fault, was sitting in her room on the other side of the room thinking that she had ruined things by kissing Jinx when the kiss had been the first good thing to happen to Jinx in a long time, the best thing, the thing she had been wanting and terrified of wanting in equal measure, and Lux didn't know.

Still Jinx couldn't respond. The words wouldn't come. Every time she opened the text thread and looked at the blank input field, the blankness reflected back at her, a mirror of the nothing that had taken up residence inside her, and she closed the phone and put it down.

Ezreal even reached out twice.

hey jinx, haven't seen you around. everything good?

And then: lux is really worried about you. we all are.

She responded to these, barely. Single words, enough to confirm that she was alive and functional and to prevent anyone from escalating their concern to the point of intervention.

fine

busy with finals

The brevity was itself a communication, a signal that Jinx knew Ezreal would read correctly, because Ezreal was perceptive, more than his personality let on. He would tell Lux that Jinx had responded. It was the best Jinx could do at the moment.

She did, though, text with Vi.

This was different. The thread with Vi, which had been established the night of the gala and which had been building steadily in the weeks since, was the one channel of communication that the numbness couldn't fully block, because Vi existed in a different part of Jinx than the part that was shut down. Vi existed in the foundation, in the code that ran beneath everything, and reaching her required less effort.

silco died, Jinx typed, on the day after it happened.

Vi's response was immediate. what? what happened? are you okay? where are you?

im at school rn. he had a heart attack. i was there when he died in the hospital

jinx oh my god i'll come as soon as i can.

you don't have to come.

i'm coming. i'll be there this weekend. don't argue with me.

Jinx didn't argue. She didn't have the energy and, beneath the numbness, she didn't want to.

Vi came that Saturday. She pulled up to the dorms in a car that Jinx later learned belonged to Caitlyn, a sleek, expensive thing that looked as out of place in a university parking lot.

The plan was to go to the apartment.

Jinx hadn't given much thought about what would happen to it. She hadn't thought past the hospital room and the flatline and the blur of the days after, hadn't considered the practical, logistical aftermath of a person's death, the physical space they leave behind and the contents of that space and the question of what to do with all of it. Silco had no family. Silco had no one, no relatives, no close friends, no emergency contact other than the foster agency and the twelve-digit case number that represented Jinx in the system's database. The apartment and everything in it was, by default, Jinx's responsibility, because there was literally no one else.

Vi drove them to Zaun, following Jinx's directions that she unfortunately knew from memory. They drove in silence when Jinx wasn't telling Vi when to turn.

They parked on the street outside the building. They walked up the four flights of stairs. Jinx had the key, still, she left it on the same keyring as her dorm key, and she unlocked the door and pushed it open and the apartment breathed out at them.

They stood in the doorway together, the two of them, and Jinx looked at the apartment, this small, complicated space where she had spent six of the most formative years of her life, and now she saw it with the dual vision of adulthood and childhood simultaneously, the adult seeing a cramped, poorly maintained unit in a rundown building and the child seeing the most stable home she had ever known.

"This is where you lived," Vi observed, and her voice was quiet and careful and full of the specific pain of a sister who is seeing, for the first time, the life she wasn't there to protect against.

"Yeah," Jinx said, and there was nothing else to say.

They went inside.

They went through the apartment the way archaeologists go through a site, room by room, item by item, uncovering the layers of a life. Vi was gentle with the process, handling Silco's possessions with a respect that surprised Jinx until she realized that the respect wasn't for Silco but for Jinx, for the fact that these objects, whatever they represented, had been the environment of Jinx's teenage years and that the handling of them was therefore the handling of something precious by proxy.

They moved to the bedroom. Silco's bedroom, the one with the double bed. Jinx stood in the doorway and looked at the bed and the child inside her, the twelve-year-old who had lain on the far side of that mattress with her back turned and her eyes open, made a sound that the adult managed to contain, a tightening of the throat and a clenching of the jaw that held the sound inside where it couldn't reach the air.

Vi saw. Vi saw because Vi was watching Jinx, having made her sister's wellbeing her navigational priority.

"Talk to me," Vi placed a hand on Jinx's shoulder, reminding her she wasn't alone.

Jinx found herself talking quickly, things spilling out like a waterfall, or a dam that was broken somewhere and water was gushing through with an intense force that didn't relent.

She talked in pieces, not the full story, not all at once, but in fragments that came out in the order they came out rather than the order they happened in, nonlinearly, recursively, circling back and jumping forward and sometimes stopping entirely before starting again from a different angle. She... she told Vi about the bed. She told her about the door without a lock. She told her about the watching and the comments and the way he sometimes said things that were meant to be caring but really, came across the opposite, what they truly were beneath the surface.

Vi listened. Her hand on Jinx's shoulder tightened as her anecdotes progressed, the grip increasing in direct proportion to the damage being described, and Jinx could feel the tension in Vi's arm, the anger that was building and being controlled, the fury of a sister who had been absent during the time when her presence was most needed and who was now hearing, years too late, the specific details of the gap she had left not by her choice.

"I'll kill him," Vi gritted her teeth, and the words were flat and genuine.

"He's already dead."

"Then I'll dig him up and kill him again."

Perhaps it was crude to say, crude to joke at so soon, but neither cared, and was it really? Jinx laughed. It was a terrible, wonderful laugh, wet and broken and startled out of her by the absurdity and the love and the futile, magnificent rage of a sister who would retroactively commit violence against a corpse, and the laugh cracked something open in Jinx's chest that the crying hadn't reached, some deep, compacted layer of grief and anger and love that had been packed down so tightly, and the cracking hurt and also freed.

They cleared the apartment over the course of the following days, impressively fast. Although it helped that the space wasn't that big.

Vi came every day, driving from Piltover in Caitlyn's car, and they worked through the contents methodically, sorting everything into categories: keep, donate, discard. The keep pile was small. Jinx's old tools, the ones she'd used to build the lock and the early mechanical devices that had been the first expressions of the thing that would eventually become her engineering career. A few books. A photograph she found in a drawer, creased and old, of herself at thirteen sitting at the kitchen table with a circuit board in front of her and a look of total concentration on her face, and the photograph was taken by Silco, which meant that he had been watching her, as always, but the watching in the photograph was different from the watching through the doorway, the watching in the photograph was the watching of someone who saw what she could do and was, in his damaged, insufficient way, impressed by it, and Jinx kept the photograph because the complication of it was the truest thing about their relationship.

Caitlyn helped with the logistics. She helped without being asked, because that was who Caitlyn was Jinx was learning, someone who saw problems and addressed them with efficient, directed competence that came miraculously from a lifetime of privilege that had been, in her case, converted into genuine capability rather than entitlement. She hired movers and cleaners. She arranged for a storage locker, paid for without discussion, for the things Jinx wanted to keep. She contacted a real estate agent, someone her family knew, to handle the sale of the apartment, because Jinx had decided, on the second day of clearing it, with a certainty that required no deliberation, that she didn't want it.

"Are you sure?" Vi had double checked.

"I'm sure. I don't want it. I don't want any part of it. Sell it and whatever money it makes can go into savings or charity or the ocean for all I care, I just don't want it anymore."

"Okay."

The apartment went on the market. The storage locker was filled with the small, curated collection of objects that Jinx had deemed worth carrying into the next phase of her life. The door to 4C on the fourth floor of the building in the Lanes was closed for the last time by Jinx, and Jinx walked away from it and down the four flights of stairs and out into the street, and she did not look back, not once.

Finals were over for everyone now.

Jinx's grades came back unsurprisingly excellent, because the part of her brain that understood engineering was separate from the part that felt things and the separation, which she had spent years cultivating, served its intended purpose during the exam period, allowing her to produce work of the quality that Viktor and the department expected while the rest of her was offline, processing grief and guilt and the complicated aftermath of losing a person who was both a wound and a shelter.

It was a Monday when Viktor called her into his office.

Viktor's office was on the top floor of the engineering building, a small, cluttered space that reflected its occupant's priorities, every surface covered with papers and prototypes and the accumulated detritus of research and teaching. Viktor himself was seated behind his desk, which he shared with a partially disassembled robotic arm and a stack of journals that looked like they might avalanche at any moment, and he looked at Jinx over the top of his glasses.

"I have a proposal," Viktor began, without preamble. "The department has funding for a summer research position. One student, selected by faculty recommendation, working directly with me on a project that I believe has significant potential. The work would involve adaptive robotics, specifically the application of behavioral algorithms to autonomous systems, which is, as we both know, the area in which your abilities are most pronounced."

Jinx looked at him. Her brain, the engineering brain, the one that worked regardless of what the rest of her was doing, processed the information with its usual speed and arrived at the conclusion before Viktor had finished speaking.

"What’re you saying?" she asked hesitantly, needing to know for certain.

"I am offering you the summer research position. It includes a stipend, campus housing, and access to the full resources of the department's workshop and laboratory facilities."

"For the whole summer?"

"Correct."

Jinx sat in the chair across from Viktor's desk and she felt something shift inside her, a tectonic movement in the landscape of her internal world, a plate moving from the compressed, gray territory of the recent weeks into something else, something that had color and warmth and the specific, recognizable texture of hope. It was the same kind of shift she had felt when Lux's first sticky note appeared on the fridge, the same cracking of ice, the same first fissure in a surface that had been frozen.

"Yes," she said immediately. "I want it. I accept."

Viktor nodded, a single, precise dip of his chin that contained, the entirety of his approval. "Good. We begin in two weeks. I suggest you rest in the interim, though I recognize that suggesting rest to you is approximately as effective as suggesting restraint to an explosion."

"I appreciate the metaphor."

"It was not a metaphor. I have seen your workshop habits. They concern me. Rest."

Jinx left Viktor's office and she walked through the engineering building and she pushed through the front doors and she was standing on the steps in the warm, late-spring sunlight and she was happy.

The happiness hit her like a tsunami, sudden and unexpected and physical, a full-body sensation that was so different from the numbness of the last weeks that it felt almost violent in its intensity. She was staying for the summer. She was going to work with Viktor. She was going to assist in groundbreaking research, build things that mattered, things with real applications and real potential, and she was going to do it in the workshop that was her safe place with the professor who was the closest thing she had to a mentor and the work was going to be hard and consuming and exactly what she needed.

Jinx thought of Lux.

The thought came instantly, reflexively. She had good news, really good news, and the good news needed to be shared and the person she wanted to share it with was Lux, had been Lux for a while now, had been Lux since the sticky notes and the monkey, and the wanting was so strong that Jinx acted on it before the other parts of her brain could intervene.

She pulled out her phone. She called Lux's number.

Lux picked up on the first ring.

"Jinx?" Her voice came through the phone and it sounded exactly the way Jinx remembered it and also different, strained and worried and careful, the voice of someone who has been waiting, waiting for something unknown. The single word, her name, Jinx's chosen name spoken in Lux's voice, was loaded with everything that had happened between them and everything that hadn't been said and the weight of the weeks of silence.

Jinx stopped walking.

She was on the pathway outside the engineering building, students flowing past her on either side, the campus alive with the post-finals energy of a semester ending and a summer beginning, and she stopped walking because the sound of Lux's voice had done something to the machinery inside her, had thrown a wrench into the gears of the mode she'd been running in, and the machinery was grinding to a halt and what was behind it, was surging forward.

She opened her mouth to tell Lux the good news. She opened her mouth to say "I got a summer research position with Viktor" and to hear Lux's voice go bright and happy and proud the way Jinx knew it would without a doubt. She opened her mouth and the words were right there, formed and ready, and then something else surged up from beneath them, something larger and darker and more urgent, the accumulated weight of everything she hadn't said, the kiss and Silco and the hospital and the apartment arrangements and the lock and the bed and the twelve-year-old who had slept beside a man she didn't trust and the eighteen-year-old who had kissed a girl in a bathroom and run away, and the weight of all of it collapsed the words before they could leave her mouth.

"Sorry," Jinx whispered.

She hung up.

She stared at the phone in her hand. The screen showed the call duration: seven seconds.

And then she ran.

She ran the way she had run from the bathroom at the party, the way she had always run, away from things that were too big and too real and too close, and her feet carried her back into the engineering building and up the stairs and through the access door that led to the roof, the one that was supposed to be locked but that Jinx had long ago figured out how to break the lock, and she burst through it and out into the open air and the sunlight and the wide, empty expanse of the rooftop that had been her secret place since the first month of school, the place she went when the world was too loud and the walls were too close and she needed to be somewhere that had no ceiling and no doors.

The rooftop was flat and broad, bordered by a low parapet wall, and it offered a view of the campus that was expansive and calming, the quad and the buildings and the green spaces laid out below like a map. Jinx had come here to think and to breathe and to look at sunsets that she had photographed a few times and sent to Lux with captions that said things like: the view up here is insane. u should come sometime.

She sat on the edge of the wall with her legs hanging over the inside of the roof and her hands gripping the concrete beneath her and she breathed and she tried to think about what she was doing and why she couldn't do the thing she wanted to do, which was simple, which was just talk to Lux, just open her mouth and produce words the way she had been producing them for months through notes and texts and conversations on the couch and in the garden and at the carnival, and the simplicity of it and her inability to accomplish it were a combination that made her want to scream.

The door creaked before she could scream.

The access door, the one she had come through minutes ago, opened with the metallic scrape of its hinges that she knew by heart, and footsteps came through it, fast and heavy, the footsteps of someone who had been running.

Jinx turned.

Lux was standing there.

She was out of breath. Her chest was heaving and her face was flushed and her hair, the golden hair that caught light and seemed to glow brighter, was windblown and slightly wild from the run. She was wearing a t-shirt and jeans and sneakers and she looked like she had left wherever she was in a hurry.

Jinx saw then, there were tears.

The tears were already there, already on her cheeks, already falling, and the sight of them hit Jinx in a place that the numbness couldn't protect, a place that was raw and exposed and that belonged entirely to Lux.

"Jinx." Lux's voice was not quiet. Lux's voice was not careful. Lux's voice was loud and breaking and full of weeks of worry and confusion and anguished frustration.

"What is happening? What is going on? You disappeared. You just vanished and I've been texting you and you haven't responded and I thought it was because of the party, because of what I did, and I am so sorry if I made you uncomfortable, I should have asked, I should have talked to you first instead of just kissing you in a bathroom at a party like an idiot and if that ruined everything then I need you to tell me so I can try to fix it because I can't do this, I can't do the silence, I can't sit on the other side of the wall knowing you're in there and not being able to reach you, it's killing me, Jinx, it's actually killing me, and I just need you to let me in because whatever it is, whatever is wrong, I want to help, I want to be there, please just let me in."

The words came out in a torrent, loud and raw and unedited, an unplanned speech that formed when someone had been holding too much for too long. Lux's face was wet and her voice was breaking and she was standing on the roof of the engineering building shouting at Jinx with tears streaming down her face and she was the most magnificent thing Jinx had ever seen, the most brave and the most kind and the most there, and the thereness of her, the fact that she had heard a seven-second phone call and a single whispered word and had somehow known to come here, to this roof, because Jinx had told her once in a text that she liked this spot, and Lux had remembered the way she remembered every small, throwaway detail that Jinx had offered, remembered and stored and carried and used, the way she was using it now, standing on the roof of the engineering building having apparently sprinted across campus to find a girl who had been hiding from everyone, including her own self.

At this realization, Jinx started to crumble. A single tear fell, and it was visible and Lux saw it and the sight changed everything in Lux's face, the frustration and the hurt draining away in an instant and being replaced by something else, something softer and more urgent, the expression of a person whose anger cannot survive the sight of someone they love in pain.

Lux crossed the roof in three steps and her arms went around Jinx and Jinx was being held, held the way Lux had held her in the garden, fully and fiercely and without reservation, and Lux's hand was on the back of her head, stroking her hair, and Lux's voice was in her ear, quiet now, all the volume gone, replaced by the warmth that was Lux's native language, the warmth that she radiated like light.

"Don't cry," Lux coaxed. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, please don't cry. I'm here. I missed you so much. We all did. I just was so worried about you."

The crying that came was not the crying Jinx had done in the hospital or in the garden or in any of the other places where the tears had been extracted by specific, acute grief. This crying was deeper and broader and came from a place that had been sealed for a very long time, a reservoir of everything she had been holding, not just Silco and the hospital and the death but the apartment and the years of being alone and the loss of Vi and the finding of Vi and the notes on the fridge and the monkey on the desk and the kiss in the bathroom and the running and the silence and the guilt of the silence and the want that wouldn't stop no matter how hard she tried to stop it, the want for this, exactly this, to be held by someone who had chosen, had wanted to hold her.

She cried into Lux's shoulder and Lux held her and the roof was open to the sky and the sky was blue and the sun was warm and the semester was over and the summer was coming and Jinx cried until the reservoir was empty and what was left was not numbness but clarity, clean, exhausted clarity.

When the crying stopped, Jinx pulled back. She wiped her face with her hands and she looked at Lux, who was also a mess, crying and red-eyed and gorgeous, and she took a breath.

"It's not about the kiss," Jinx started.

Lux's eyes widened. "It's not?"

"The kiss was good. I... I liked it a lot. It maybe overwhelmed me a bit at first, but that's because I realized the kiss was the first good thing that happened to me in a while and I ran away from it because that's what I do when good things happen, I run, because I spent most of my life learning that good things don't last and the leaving hurts less if you do it first." She paused, swallowed, and continued. "But I didn't plan on disappearing for days because of that. Something else just had horrible timing, and I'm sorry, I'm sorry I suck at communication and you didn't deserve to deal with my inability to handle emotions."

"What-what happened?"

She told Lux about Silco. She skipped over the bed and everything else, but told her the recent part, the phone call and the hospital and the death and the apartment and the clearing of it and getting it ready for sale. She told of the strange, complicated grief of losing someone who had made her almost everything she was today, the good and bad. She told her that she had been dealing with it and that dealing with it had consumed everything she had and that there had been nothing left over for notes or texts or conversations, and the nothing had not been a selective choice.

"He wasn't a good man," Jinx told her. "He was a bad father in ways that I'm still figuring out. But he was the only one I really had, and he's gone now, and I don't know how to feel because the feelings about him were always complicated and death doesn't simplify them the way you'd think it would. It actually makes them worse, because you can't resolve anything with someone who isn't there anymore."

Lux listened with her whole self, her attention total and her presence unwavering, and she didn't interrupt and she didn't offer solutions and she didn't try to fix anything.

When Jinx finished, Lux said, "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry you went through that alone."

"I wasn't totally alone. Vi was there."

"I'm glad."

"I'm sorry I shut you out. I didn't know how to do anything else."

"You don't have to apologize for that."

"No, but I do, and I want to. You were out there thinking you'd done something wrong and you hadn't. You did the opposite of wrong. The kiss, Lux, the kiss was the opposite of wrong, it was the most right thing that's happened to me and I want it again, I want you to know that, I want you to know that I've been wanting it since before the party and I'll probably be wanting it for a long time after this conversation and the only reason I ran was because I just got stupidly scared and then Silco called and everything fell apart and I..."

Lux looked at her and Jinx looked at Lux and Lux reached forward and took Jinx's hand, threading their fingers together.

"I want it again too," Lux replied.

They sat on the roof for a long time after that, holding hands, talking about smaller things and bigger things and the things in between. They didn't kiss. The moment for that would come, later, in its own time, in a place that wasn't a rooftop and a time that wasn't the raw aftermath of everything that had happened. But the understanding between them, the mutual acknowledgment of what they were and what they wanted, settled over them like a blanket, comforting and present and enough.

The bond grew back.

They didn't have a formal conversation about the state of their relationship, didn't sit down and define terms or establish labels or anything. What they had was subtler than a conversation and more honest than a label, an understanding that communicated itself through proximity and touch and the specific, unmistakable way they oriented toward each other in any room they shared.

The texts resumed. The notes on the fridge resumed. The doors resumed their position, ajar, open, the slivers of light and sound that connected their separate spaces restored.

Lux helped Jinx through the moments that thoughts about Silco hit her with force, and Lux would hold her and comfort her and drop everything to be there for Jinx, to be Jinx's light in the times that the darkness became too overwhelming. Lux was good at that, at being Jinx's constant, at being a guiding force, at being her lighthouse.

The touching resumed, and if anything it increased, Jinx's hands finding Lux's more frequently and with less pretense, the gestures that had previously been deniable as friendly now carrying an openness that acknowledged what they were. Jinx's head on Lux's shoulder. Jinx's fingers tracing idle patterns on Lux's knee. Lux's hand on the small of Jinx's back when they walked together. The touches were not dramatic, but quiet and constant and woven into the fabric of their daily interactions with natural ease.

Their friends noticed this. Their friends had always noticed. But the quality of their noticing had shifted from teasing speculation to happy, knowing acceptance.

It was a Wednesday afternoon in late May. The semester was over. Finals were done. The campus was in the transitional state between the academic year and the summer session, most of the students gone and the remaining preparing to leave.

The group was on a blanket.

Lux had brought it; the blanket was large and worn and a shade of gold that matched many things Lux owned, and it was spread on the grass in the center of the quad, and on it were arranged the people who had become, over the course of a semester, the closest thing to a chosen family that Jinx had.

Ezreal was lying on his back with his hands behind his head and his eyes closed, soaking up the sun with blissful uncomplicated enjoyment. Kayn was sitting at the edge of the blanket with his customary air of aggressive relaxation, reading something on his phone that was either very interesting or very upsetting (perhaps both), his expression providing no useful data on which. Sarah was propped on her elbows, sunglasses on, looking like she had been staged for a magazine photoshoot, because Sarah always looked like that. Soraka had brought tea and she was sharing it with Neeko, who was lying on her stomach drawing something in a sketchbook and who looked up periodically to smile at the group.

Jinx was lying on her back with her head in Lux's lap.

Lux's fingers were in Jinx's hair, idly moving through the blue strands, a gesture that had become habitual.

"So," Jinx piped up to the group and to the sky and to the cozy afternoon air. "I have news."

"Good news or bad news?" Ezreal asked.

"Possibly the best news."

"Tell us," Soraka encouraged, with gentle, attentive interest.

"Professor Viktor offered me a summer research position. Full stipend, campus housing, access to the workshop and the lab. I'm staying for the summer. I'm going to be working on adaptive robotics with the department's top professor and it's going to be incredible and I'm extremely excited about it and I wanted... I wanted to share it with you guys."

The response was immediate and unanimous.

Ezreal sat up and said "That's amazing!" with his usual enthusiasm.

Kayn nodded, which was, as always, the highest form of Kayn approval.

Sarah lowered her sunglasses and said "Obviously they chose you, anyone with taste would."

Soraka let out a congratulatory, happy squeal.

Neeko said "Your aura is so bright right now!" and drew something in her sketchbook.

Lux's fingers in Jinx's hair had gone still, and Jinx tilted her head back to look up at Lux's face, which was upside down from this angle.

"You're amazing. I'm so proud of you," Lux smiled widely, and the words were simple and they were enormous and they were everything Jinx needed and wanted.

"Also," Lux continued, looking up at the group, her fingers resuming their movement through Jinx's hair, "since we're sharing news, I'd like to reveal that I've decided to stay too. The university offered me a position as a student ambassador, working with the international relations department. So I'll be on campus all summer."

"You're staying for that?" Ezreal questioned with a shit-eating grin.

"Of course, it's a great opportunity."

"Really? 'Cause you had been talking to me over and over about how you weren't sure if you wanted this, how you also had internships waiting in Demacia that may fit your interests more and look better on your resume."

"Well, I changed my mind. I looked more into the student ambassador role and if I do well this summer, next summer I can go abroad for free and visit various foreign governments." 

"Oh, so that changed your mind and not at all because Jinx just said she'll be on campus?"

"That's-that's a complete coincidence!"

"Sure Luxy."

"That fact was unrelated to my decision-making process."

"Oh I believe you, one hundred percent."

Lux threw a handful of grass at him and everyone, including Jinx, laughed at Lux's easily detectable excuses. Jinx didn't just feel amusement though, she felt something else too that told her that when everyone else was gone, she was going to kiss Lux. 

In the meantime before that, Jinx continued to lay in Lux's lap and look at the sky, which was blue, the good blue, the blue she had described in her very first note as the color that wasn't navy, and she thought about the past school year that had just happened and the things she had survived and the things she had found and the person whose lap she was lying in and whose fingers were in her hair.

She thought about all the notes and all the conversations and all the touches and the drunk girl on the couch and meeting her friends and going to her home and talking in the garden and the ferris wheel and the bathroom and the rooftop and every moment between and after that had led from there to here, from a closed door to an open sky.

Their fingers found each other, intertwining together without any difficulty, and their hands rested on the warm fabric beneath them, interlocked, Jinx's calloused fingers and Lux's smooth, carefully maintained ones, and the contact was small and quiet and contained between the two of them.

The sun was warm. The quad was lush and green. The summer was just beginning. Jinx, for the first time in her life, was not running from anything and was not hiding behind a mask or a door or a distance.

She was here. She was staying.

"Hey, Lux," Jinx murmured, the rest of the group engaged in their own conversations now.

"Hey, Jinx."

"Since we're both staying for the summer and all, wanna be roommates?"

"I'd love nothing more."

fin.