Chapter Text
Lux's earliest memory is of creating light unprompted.
She had been playing with Garen, their usual game of being a knight and a princess in a tower trapped by a horrible dragon; she got just a bit too excited, and suddenly the room was a tad brighter than it was before, a big ball of light floating right between them.
She had been too young at the time to understand why it was that all of the joy seemed to have been stripped from her brother's face, his expression now mortified in a way she had never seen him – Garen was never afraid of anything, yet here he was, suddenly looking at her like she was a real dragon instead of a make-belief princess.
She couldn’t understand why he didn’t seem to find the light as pretty as she did, why he froze and then adamantly insisted that she didn’t do that again, especially not near mom and dad; but she just nodded, deflated, because he was her big brother, and she trusted him with all her heart; Garen would never do anything to hurt her.
Years later, she would understand his reaction.
*****
It happens again a couple of years later during dinner.
She doesn’t remember what was said, or why her magic manifested; she’s quite sure it was something banal, unimportant, or else she would remember it like she remembers what happened next.
Garen’s face, once again, turned immediately terrified, his widened eyes flicking between her, their mother, who wore a dangerously blank expression, and their father, who looked angrier than Lux had ever seen him in her life, his nostrils flared, his jaw clenched, fists slightly trembling as if he was controlling himself not to throw his glass of wine at the dining hall wall.
There was no screaming, no overreaction; despite their father’s body language indicating the opposite, his tone was strangely measured, low, when he asked Lux how long she’d been able to do that. She couldn’t find her voice, instead looking between their father, her brother, and their mother, who was as still as one of the statuaries that decorated the immense garden in front of the castle.
She doesn’t remember what exactly was said. All she remembers is her father calmly sentencing her to life imprisoned in a tower, away from everyone, while their mother didn’t lift a finger to stop him. She vividly remembers Garen getting smacked across the face by the back of their father’s hand when he, perhaps a bit too loudly, protested against the decision. Their mother, her voice uncharacteristically devoid of emotion, said that the usual punishment for manifesting magic was death; really, lord Crownguard was being quite benevolent in simply locking his daughter away instead. The sight of Garen being dragged out of the room kicking and screaming, begging their father to reconsider or their mother to stop this, becomes ingrained in her mind as the last time she saw him.
The guards took her away unceremoniously the very next morning after a night locked in her room; people whom Lux had grown to like, some of them love, even, along the years, whom had treated her with kindness in the past, flashing her bright, warm smiles whenever she walked past them, now looking at her as if she were the lowest of criminals, or the worst of monsters.
In the following eighteen long, lonely years, Lux grew to hate her magic as well.
*****
She grows accustomed to life in the tower over the years.
She doesn’t like it, not at all; she’s locked in a magic-dampening place, no way in or out, no opening whatsoever except for a single, lonely window far above the ground through which people – guards from the castle, she assumes – send her food on a crude lifting system consisting of a rope far too frail to hold the weight of a person. They don’t speak to her, and she doesn’t look at them before they quickly leave.
Their parents at the very least made sure the tower was comfortable, or as comfortable as a prison can be; the bed is soft, the place is moderately well-decorated and furnished, and she has a plethora of books occupating the lavish shelves that cover the walls (none on magic, or even fantasy, of course.) Lux is not thankful; despite hating her magic, she knows she has absolutely no obligation to be grateful for the bare minimum.
She is, however, thankful for Garen, for she knows that the fantasy books, as well as the ones on magic, and the painting supplies, puzzles, flowers, snacks and stuffed animals are his doing; he makes sure to smuggle them into the tower through the rope system along with a letter telling her about his life, his week, and how much he misses and loves her, every single week. Most of her belongings have been gifts from him. Knowing their parents, she knows how much he’s risking his neck by doing this, and she was sure the gifts and letters would have stopped after a couple of months, or even years, but they never did. He’s been doing it consistently for eighteen years, and Lux has never loved and missed her brother more.
She doesn’t risk leaving letters for Garen to find when she sends the empty food basket back down; she knows the guards are the ones who handle it, and if they find it, Garen will be in an incredible amount of trouble, possibly lose his spot in the royal guard, maybe even be cast out by their parents. Lux can only hope he knows how much she appreciates his gesture, and how much it’s kept her sane.
The letters which she is unable to reply to are as far as her contact with other people goes for those eighteen years; she reads them out loud, apart from singing, occasionally carrying out long monologues, and talking to the birds who will often land on her windowsill, because she doesn’t want her voice to go unbelievably rough from lack of use, and because she feels she might go insane if she doesn’t. The guards who bring her food don’t talk to her, and her parents seem to have decided to forget about her existence.
Imagine her surprise, then, when she gets out of her room one morning to be met with the sight of a girl much taller than her, with electric blue hair tied back into long twin braids that fall down her back to almost reach the floor and dressed in colorful clothes unlike any Lux has ever seen in her relatively brief time at her parents’ ancestral home, examining the paintings on her walls with curiosity and shuffling through one of her books, several more of them scattered all over the wooden floor.
Her reaction is, most likely, predictable: she lets out a loud, startled scream, stumbles backwards dropping her mug of coffee, a violent flash of light erupting from her hands before she falls square on her backside. The girl, to her credit, doesn’t immediately start firing the massive weapon that Lux has just noticed had been hanging on her back at her hip, that’s reminiscent of a cannon comprised of several smaller gun barrels; Lux, then notices the second huge weapon – over her shoulder, an even bigger one that is reminiscent of a shark with a wide gaping mouth as its barrel. Lux has read about firearms from other lands in the books Garen has smuggled into her tower, but she has never seen anything that looks like whatever it is the intruder is carrying.
She does, however, visibly startle with a jump, and turns so fast towards Lux the young mage could be forgiven for mistaking it for some sort of magical enhancement. She points the bloody thing, the slightly smaller gun, right at her, and when she looks at Lux, her expression seems briefly deranged. The weapon starts to whirr to life.
It seems to go away as soon as the intruder actually looks at her. The gun-thing dies back down, and her face assumes a more neutral expression.
The girl slightly lowers her gun and scrutinizes her for several painful seconds with eyes that are unnaturally pink and, disturbingly, have a hint of murder behind them. Lux can’t find it in herself to move a muscle; she can barely breathe.
“Who’re you?” The girl asks, in a tone as measured as Lux guesses she can manage, cautious, and she reminds her a bit of a falcon who once landed on her windowsill and stared at her with distrust before ultimately flying away when Lux approached the window a bit.
It’s all too surreal for Lux to be able to reply immediately; she’s looking at the first human being she’s seen in eighteen years, a bizarrely-dressed, uncannily tall girl carrying weapons that seem to have been designed with the explicit purpose of killing as many people as possible in one fell swoop, who has inexplicably entered her tower through a window that is several hundred meters above ground and had been walking around like she owned the place a few seconds ago. She briefly wonders if she’s dreaming, but she can’t bring herself to move enough to pinch herself. The girl just keeps staring, the weapon lowered but still undeniably trained on her.
Once the shock fades enough, though, it gives way to bafflement.
“I-“ Lux stammers, indignation bubbling to the surface, but without moving from her spot on the floor. “Who am I? Who are you?! What are you doing in here, how did you even get in here?!”
The girl stares at her like she’s stupid.
“Through the window?” She says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and Lux’s jaw drops.
“The window is hundreds of meters above the ground!”
“I climbed,” the intruder shrugs, and her weapon lowers further. She seems to be relaxing around her, despite Lux’s exasperation.
“You-“ Lux scoffs in disbelief, before briefly closing her eyes and sighing. “Who are you and what are you doing in my tower?”
“I was curious,” the stranger says, nonchalantly, and finally puts her strange gun away. “I’ve seen a lot of crazy shit over the years, but never a lone tower with a single window in the ass-end of a thick forest.”
Okay, she has to be dreaming. There is no possible way this is actually happening.
Lux pinches herself.
It has no effect other than leaving her arm slightly sore.
“You climbed an absurdly tall tower without help, in the middle of nowhere, because you were curious?”
The girl simply shrugs again.
(She HAS to be dreaming.)
Lux stares back at her in utter disbelief. The tension in the girl’s body seems to have dissipated now, and she looks almost bored, no longer looking at the mage on the floor, instead having gone back to studying the paintings on the walls.
Lux takes a deep breath.
“You haven’t answered my question. Who are you?” She says, her tone serious. The stranger squints at her with an undecipherable expression on her face.
“Jinx.”
Lux pauses.
“What?”
“My name,” the girl explains, the ghost of a smirk on the corners of her lips. “It’s Jinx.” She tilts her head to the side, furrowing her brows. “What about you? What are you doing in a big-ass tower with a single window as the way in or out? Can you... I don’t know, fly, or something? I know a guy who can fly, sort of.”
Lux opens her mouth to speak, about to explain her whole situation, but quickly shuts it, deciding against it. The intruder, Jinx, no doubt noticed her magical outburst when she saw her standing in the room, but that doesn’t mean she is willing to spill her life story and the sordid details of it to literally the first person she has seen in years.
“It’s not supposed to be a way in or out,” she decides to say, instead, her voice more muted as she gets up. “Not for me, anyway.”
Jinx raises an eyebrow.
“Sheesh, so you’re trapped in here?” She stretches, and starts to walk around her room, examining the walls, touching the spines of her books, as if this was a completely normal situation. “Fucking sucks. I definitely would have died of boredom.”
“I- it’s complicated,” Lux shakes her head. She stares at Jinx, so nonchalant in her exploration of the room, and the reality of the situation seems to finally sink in. Lux finds herself blurting out before she can stop it: “Are you real?”
Jinx stills abruptly, only slightly north of freezing completely. She turns around, that strangely blank expression on her face again for only a couple of seconds before she shrugs for a third time.
“I think so. Why?”
“I-“ Lux suddenly feels tears rising to her eyes, threatening to spill. Her voice quivers. “Forgive me, it’s just... you’re the first person I’ve seen in eighteen years.”
Jinx freezes again, her eyebrows furrowing and her eyes widening slightly.
“What, for real?” For the first time, she actually sounds surprised. Lux feels a tear run down her cheek before she can stop it, and can’t quite tell if it’s from being relieved, sad, overwhelmed, all of those things at once, or something else entirely. Jinx, surprisingly enough, tilts her head to the side again and frowns a bit in what looks like concern.
Lux quickly, almost angrily, wipes the tear away with the palm of her hand.
“It’s a long story,” she laugh-cries, her voice shaking, and quickly points at Jinx’s strange big guns, now hanging on her back, in an attempt to change the subject. “What are those? I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Jinx’s face seems to instantly light up, an almost manic grin taking over her expression as she pulls the smaller gun to her front again.
“These?” She sounds genuinely gleeful in an almost childlike way, seemingly proud of the weapon in her hands. “It’s Pow-Pow and Fishbones!”
It’s Lux who tilts her head, now, furrowing her brows in confusion.
“Pow-Pow...?”
“It’s what I call them,” Jinx explains excitedly, stepping closer to Lux so suddenly it makes her startle. If Jinx notices it, she doesn’t seem to care. “Do you like them? I made’em myself!”
“You made this?” Lux automatically reaches out to touch it in awe, then stops herself. “Are you a...” She struggles to remember the information from her books on various weapons. “A gunsmith, then?”
Jinx shrugs once again.
“More of an inventor,” She says, and pulls a device that looks suspiciously like an explosive from one of her side bags, turning it in her hands. “I make lots of stuff.” She twists the device in a certain way, and it pops open; it makes Lux instinctively jump, bracing for an explosion, but it never comes. Instead, the opening reveals a light inside the device, bright blue, as blue as Jinx’s hair, casting faint shadows on the walls.
“Whoa,” It slips out of Lux’s lips automatically, and as she stares at the device in awe, she can’t help but notice how genuinely overjoyed the grin on Jinx’s face seems to be. She reaches out again, this time not being able to hold herself back, but it doesn’t seem to bother Jinx, who hands out the device to her. She turns it in her own hands, examining the object. It seems, somehow, improvised yet made with great care at the same time. “Is...” Lux swallows audibly, without looking away from the device in her hands. “Is this... magic?”
She fully expects Jinx to freeze, to look concerned or terrified, like Garen always did whenever she slipped up or mentioned magic to him, but the girl simply shakes her head casually.
“Nah. Some of my stuff is Hextech, but this is just engineering.”
“Hextech?” Lux remembers reading about it in one of Garen’s letters, a surprisingly efficient mixture of engineering and magic. “Are you from Piltover?”
Jinx makes a slight face.
“Yikes. No, Zaun. But my sister works in Piltover. Her girlfriend’s from there.”
Lux turns the device over in her hands once more.
“Where did you learn to make these?”
“I dunno. I just grew up making them. I guess I perfected the craft over the years.” She makes another face. “Oh, wow. I sounded like Cait just now.”
Lux raises an eyebrow.
“Aforementioned sister’s girlfriend,” Jinx simply says, and the name seems to ring a bell in Lux’s mind, but she doesn’t inquire on it further. “Anyway, you’re a mage, right? I saw how you did the light thingamajig earlier.”
She says it so naturally, so nonchalantly, it’s made abundantly, crystal clear she doesn’t seem to see magic in a bad light whatsoever, but the word ‘mage’ still makes Lux’s heart sink regardless. Having to step on eggshells around her parents for two years ever since accidentally discovering her powers, and then having learned to hate said powers for eighteen years more, has done that word no favors in her mind and hearing it still invokes a bad reaction in her.
Still, she finds it in herself to reply.
“I... yes, I am.” She lowers her head and stares at the device once more, suddenly incapable of looking Jinx in the eye. “It’s actually why I’ve been locked up in here.”
Jinx pauses, studies her for a second that feels longer than it actually is.
“Oh, I get it,” she says, her tone a bit more measured, but still entirely too casual for a subject which has been the reason Lux’s life has been miserable. “Your family is that anti-mage type. Got more than a few of them in Piltover before the whole Hextech thing. A lot of people still don’t like magic.”
Lux has a feeling she knows the answer, but she asks it anyway.
“Do you... I mean, are you one of those people?”
“Nah.” Her response is immediate, and a huge weight seems to lift off of Lux’s shoulders. “Way I see it, magic’s not that different from a bomb. You can blow shit up with both of them, so it doesn’t really matter.” Lux’s heart sinks a bit again at hearing the comparison of magic to a bomb, but the way Jinx says it doesn’t seem like it’s made in a negative light. “Plus, it can amplify other stuff too. That’s pretty cool. Vi and Cait say people who hate mages are stupid. I agree.”
Lux makes the connection of the name Vi to Jinx’s previously mentioned sister, but what sticks out the most is the fact that Jinx has now made it explicitly clear she doesn’t hate magic, and that there are several more people who seem to agree with her.
There are several people who would probably think she doesn’t deserve to be locked up in a tower forever, isolated from everyone, or killed, because of who she is.
For some reason, that fills Lux with so much relief the tears start to stream freely, now.
“I’m sorry, I'm just-“ Lux tries to explain her outburst, but it gets cut off by a broken sob, and that undecipherable, slightly concerned look comes back to Jinx’s face. It makes Lux cry harder.
Jinx keeps staring at her for a few more seconds, before a wicked glint comes to her eyes.
“Tell ya what, Sunshine,” she says, a smirk now matching the look in her violet eyes, “I think you could use some time outside, see what the world out there’s been up to in the last eighteen years.”
Lux freezes.
“I...” She stammers, now eyeing the wooden floor beneath her feet. “You mean, like... you’re saying I should... leave the tower?”
“Don’t see why not.” Jinx’s tone is, once again, alarmingly nonchalant, in a way that indicates she has no idea how serious what she’s suggesting is.
“B-but that’s... I’m not supposed to go outside, I need to stay in here!”
“That you talking? Or your family?”
Okay, Lux thinks, maybe Jinx does know how serious her suggestion is, she just doesn’t care.
It gives Lux pause, though, her question. For whole eighteen years, she’s known, in her heart, that her parents had been wrong; the books brought to her by Garen, explaining so many things about magic, how it can be used for good, for healing, for lighting the way, only reinforced that feeling, turned it into a conviction. She knows she shouldn’t be locked in this tower, doesn’t deserve it.
Why then, is she so adamant about not leaving?
Why is she insisting to the first person who she’s seen in such a long time, who might be her only chance of getting out of this despicable prison, that she should, in fact, stay in there?
“It’s illegal,” she mutters, probably a last resort of her mind to rationalize a decision she knows would be actually made out of fear and self-loathing.
Jinx snorts.
“You make that sound like a bad thing.” The grin on her face when Lux looks back up at her is positively wicked now, no mistaking it.
(She definitely knows how serious this is.)
When Lux doesn’t reply, Jinx speaks up again:
“Look, blondie, even though Vi and Cait have managed to make me rein it in a little, I still have a pretty strong disregard for authority, so I’ll give you that. But even I can tell when a rule is bullshit.” She pauses, her tone surprisingly a little bit gentler. “If there’s one thing I learned, is that a lot of the time, the people making the rules are only interested in their own... whatever it is they want. Even Cait says so, and she’s a gods-damned cop. People in charge don’t give a shit if everyone else is hurting as long as they have their way. And this anti-mage thing? It’s one of those cases.”
Lux is silent for what feels like a whole minute. Jinx sighs, sounding a bit disappointed.
“Okay, I get it,” she puts her hands up in defeat, backing off. “Won’t force you to leave if you want to stay here. Personally, I think it’s a bunch of horsecrap, but if that’s what you want, that’s what you want.” She turns to leave, heads back to the window, then stops, turns back towards Lux slightly, a smirk on her face. “Nice meeting ya, Sunshine.”
She braces herself on the windowsill, no doubt preparing to climb back down. Something in Lux makes her cry out:
“Wait!”
Jinx stills, turns her head as much as she can to face Lux. Her expression is expectant, but other than that it gives nothing away.
It takes a moment for Lux to find her voice again. She’s suddenly hyper-aware of how hard she’s breathing.
“Can you really do it?” Her voice is small. Jinx raises an eyebrow. “I mean, can you really get me out of here?” She elaborates, blushing a bit – if it’s from embarassment or adrenaline, she can’t tell.
“Sure can.”
They stare at each other for what feels like an eternity more, and Lux feels like she’s standing on the edge of a precipice, still not entirely sure if she should jump off; she knows there’s no coming back from this. If she leaves this tower, even her parents probably wouldn’t be able to stop her from getting executed. She’s not sure they’d even want to. Knowing them, they might even sanction it.
What about Garen? Will he continue to obliviously write her letters, unknowing of her departure? No, the guards will undoubtedly notify their parents once the food basket isn’t pulled up; Garen will know. Will he go looking for her, will he find a way to climb the tower? Will he frantically beg their father not to sentence his little sister to death, their mother to do something and stop him?
Then she looks at Jinx, still braced over the windowsill, her wild blue braids slightly blown around by the wind, her big violet eyes staring at her expectantly, that wicked glint still in them, and decides to take the plunge.
“Take me with you,” she breathes out, and it feels like a gigantic weight’s been taken off her shoulders. She hasn’t moved a muscle, is still standing in the exact same spot as before, in her tower, but somehow, it’s like she can breathe properly for the first time in eighteen excruciatingly long years.
She feels weightless and extremely heavy at the same time.
Jinx’s face splits into a huge, joyful grin.
“I thought you’d never ask!” She all but sprints back to where Lux is standing in heavy steps, making the shorter girl jump, and casually throws her arm around her shoulders as if they’d been friends for years, her other hand on her own hip. “You’re gonna have a blast out there, blondie, you'll see. I can even bring you back later if you really want to, but I don’t think you will.”
Lux swallows, her heartbeat impossibly faster.
“How are we getting down?”
Jinx cracks her knuckles.
“You can leave that to me, no worries.” Her smirk is almost smug now. “But I am gonna need your name. Unless you’re okay with me calling you ‘blondie’ or ‘Sunshine’ the whole time.”
Lux pushes a strand of blonde hair behind her ear, somewhat self-consciously.
“It’s Luxanna.”
“I like it!” Jinx shakes her a bit, still in an almost childlike glee. “Suits you. Okay, you ready to go, then? Let me-“
“Wait,” Lux interrupts, and Jinx almost looks disappointed for a split second, but the mage quickly elaborates, “I need to grab my stuff, or- some of it, at least.” Garen comes to mind. “And I need to write a letter. For my brother.”
Jinx’s face immediately grows suspicious. She squints.
“Your brother?” She says, cocking an eyebrow. “I thought your family had been the ones to lock you up in here.”
“It wasn’t Garen’s fault,” Lux quickly defends her brother. “He tried to stop it, he tried to stop my father, tried to convince my mother-“ She chokes up, the image of Garen being smacked across the face with such force he was knocked off the chair and onto the floor flashing in her mind’s eye. “He tried to stop it. Father would have had him killed if he got me out of here.” Her eyes fill with tears. “He wrote letters. Brought me gifts. Our parents don’t know.” A tear rolls down her cheek. “He’s the only thing that’s kept me sane.”
An uncomfortable silence stretches between them, but when Lux looks up, Jinx’s face has softened considerably; she thinks she sees sympathy in her eyes.
“Fair enough,” she says, and turns towards the shelves to examine the books on them once more. “Take your time, I ain’t leaving without you.”
‘I ain’t leaving without you.’ For some reason, those words make Lux’s heart grow three times bigger and fill with warmth.
“Thank you,” she says before hurrying off to collect her belongings. She grabs her bag first, the one she had carried her things in when she had been brought to the tower. Picks a couple of books from her shelf, mostly the ones on light magic, but some others on magic in general, as well as a single fantasy one, her favorite, which Garen would read her before bed when they were kids, before this whole thing happened. She gets a few days’ worth of supplies as well, food that didn’t spoil which came up in the basket and she had kept for later as well as water. Takes the lute leaning against her bedroom wall, another gift from her brother, which she had learned to play by herself. She grabs her dagger from under her pillow, something Garen had sent her in the event she had to defend herself. Lastly, she pulls open her drawers, grabs Garen’s most recent letters, the ones from the last three months, and grabs her makeshift staff, which she had improvised from what little she had in the tower. She turns to leave, when she catches a glimpse of the first toy Garen had sent her, a stuffed Poro which she named ‘Sir Hugs-a-Lot’ and which had been visibly well-taken care of. Lux grabs him as well and stuffs him in her bag.
She nearly sprints back to the main room from her bedroom, grabs a piece of parchment and a quill from her desk, and starts thinking of everything she wanted to say to her brother in all those years. She presses the quill to the parchment as starts writing, stopping only when she feels satisfied with the content of the letter, which nearly fills the whole page. She then takes it, and hurries off to meet Jinx by the window.
The tall girl is sitting on the windowsill, twirling her light device in her hand, without a care in the world. Lux approaches her excitedly.
“All done?” She asks, and Lux can only nod in return, trying to ignore the knot in her throat. “Alright, then! Don’t worry about the height, just make sure to hold on tight to me on the way down.”
Lux turns her head, takes one last look at the tower which had been both her home and her prison for eighteen years of her life. She tries to take in all the details, all her paintings, the books she’s leaving behind on the shelf which had kept her company in the nights she cried and screamed her throat raw. The small, faint stains on the floorboards from when she punched the wall so hard in frustration it cracked open her knuckles and made her blood drip over the pristine floor, something she kept scrubbing at for hours later; it never came off entirely.
She takes a deep breath, looking one last time at the room which had been her entire world for most of her life, and, trembling, wraps her arms around Jinx.
“This is probably gonna feel a bit scary to you,” is all the warning she gets before Jinx jumps off the windowsill with a cackle, making Lux shut her eyes tightly, gripping the other girl so tight she’s sure her knuckles have turned white. Her breathing all but stops as she feels the wind violently blow on her hair, her clothes, and the freefall turns into a soar when she hears the loud clank of something mechanical, followed by a crunch of stone up above. The fall gradually slows, stops, but Lux doesn’t dare open her eyes until they have come to a complete halt.
Lux realizes she has wrapped her legs as well as her arms around Jinx’s body when she feels the other girl’s feet hit the ground with a quiet thud. Slowly, she opens her eyes to see her retract her grappling hook from the tower wall, her expression no different from before she jumped out the window with Lux in her arms. She doesn't seem strained from carrying the weight of the young mage with her body.
Trembling, reluctantly, Lux unwraps herself from Jinx, her feet slowly lowering to the ground, her knees shaking violently. As soon as she’s no longer holding onto the taller girl, they buckle under her, and she’s suddenly on all fours, unable to breathe properly, her fingers clutching the vibrantly green grass underneath her. Her stomach churns, but she swallows back the bile, her heart beating what she’s sure must be a million beats per minute. She buries her fingers so deep into the ground she digs up dirt. It feels refreshingly cool against her digits.
She feels Jinx kneel down on one knee beside her.
“You okay there, blondie?” Her voice is excited, joyful, but it carries a hint of concern in it. Lux frantically nods.
“I’m alright, I just...” She takes a deep, uneven breath. “I just need a minute.”
“It’s okay, take your time.” Jinx gets back on her feet.
Lux closes her eyes, takes one, two more deep breaths. She braces herself, and pushes herself up with her hands, wobbling when she gets up on her knees. She does it again, tries to stand, almost falls over; Jinx quickly steadies her with a firm hand.
She clutches it like her life depends on it, panting, and looks up at the sky. She feels, absurdly, like she’s gonna fall up into it; she has seen the sky from her window every day, sure, but for years there had been a roof over her head. The only thing grounding her right now is, unironically, the ground itself.
That, and Jinx’s hand in hers.
(She feels impossibly warm to the touch, but then again, Lux hadn’t touched another person in eighteen years.)
She lets out a breathless laugh filled with tears when it sinks in. The sun is shining on her face, the breeze blowing in her hair, and though she has felt these sensations in the tower, it has never felt like this. This is different. She can finally breathe, really breathe, for once.
She feels like dancing, like sprinting, like laughing and crying, all at the same time, so she just stays in place, because it’s so overwhelming, but in the best way possible; not for the first time today, she feels a tear roll down her cheek.
This one, though, is followed by several others.
She remembers the letter to her brother, which she’s somehow still clutching in her hand, the parchment now slightly wrinkled.
“I need to leave this in a place the guards won’t find,” she says, her voice shaking, and starts scurrying the tower’s immediate surroundings for a hiding spot; Garen will still be held accountable if anyone finds out he’s kept in touch with her the whole time.
“Won’t that mean your brother won’t find it either?” Jinx inquires, and Lux shakes her head.
“Garen will search thoroughly, I’m sure of it.” He had never been one to give up easily, or at all. From his letters, that hasn’t changed one bit. She notices a loose brick on the tower’s outer wall, near the ground. “There.” She pulls the insufferably heavy thing out with great strain, revealing a dusty nook which is perfect for hiding her letter in.
She opens it, rereads it one last time.
‘Dearest Garen,
I don’t know how to thank you enough for everything you’ve done for me over the last years. Your gifts helped me understand my powers, your letters kept me company in the darkest, scariest nights – I kept all of them, every single one, and the knowledge that you were still thinking of me all these years has brought me no small amount of comfort.
I sincerely hope you don’t blame yourself for what happened; it was NOT your fault, and I’m entirely sure you would have stopped father from locking me up, or gotten me out of this tower, if you could. I want you to know I’ve never blamed you, not for a second. I know you did everything in your power to help me. And you have, more than you could possibly imagine.
You won’t find me here anymore. You know as well as I do that I’ve done nothing to deserve being imprisoned for my whole life. I want to actually live my life instead of just waiting for it to be over, and I found a safe way to do so.
I beg of you, don’t come look for me. You’ve risked enough by keeping in contact; I don’t want to be the reason you’re expelled from the guard, exiled from the family, or executed for treason. You’ve got your life to live as well, so please live it, for me.
I’m forever grateful for everything you’ve done for me. I couldn’t have asked for a better brother. I want you to know you’re the only thing that’s kept me sane all these years.
I will never forget you.
Love you always,
Lux.’
She takes a deep, shaking breath, folds the letter and puts it in the nook in the wall before pushing the big brick back into place. She doesn’t bother leaving a piece of it showing, for she doesn’t want the guards to find it, and she’s sure Garen’s attention to detail will make him notice the loose brick, but she does leave a small mark on the stone with her dagger: a crude drawing of a shield with the sun in it, something she hopes will drive Garen to investigate the brick further.
She turns away from the wall, towards Jinx. The girl is staring at her with an excited smirk on her face.
“You ready?” She asks.
Lux takes a step forward.
“Absolutely.”