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It must have happened on the way from the bridge, and when she woke up, the first thing she asked for was him – the Doctor tells her, now.
Not a good time for this talk – she can judge by herself, thank you very much. Piltover is burning, Vi ran off somewhere with her girlfriend and she won’t be back for Powder because there’s only Jinx, and Sevika can’t be found when one needs her.
At least the Doctor never moves from his lab, no matter the hubbub outside it. So, when Jinx barges inside, he seems almost like he’s waiting – peaceful, in front of some corpse she cannot care less about.
She’s got another for him. Well, at least Mylo thinks it’s a corpse too. She hopes it’s not. It mustn’t be. And even if it were, the Doctor can fix him, he can, he has to, HE MUST. She’s not getting out of here until he does.
The Doctor is awfully chatty for someone with a dagger to their throat.
Jinx would usually find it funny, but now she only thinks he should hurry up with preparing, because it might already be too late.
And whose fault is that?
Hers, hers, HERS, everything seems to be yelling inside her that it’s hers and oh, she’s going to stab Singed if he doesn’t hurry and—
The dose she gets is for a man twice her size, but she still manages to stumble with it in her veins. To the table – to him – and runs her fingers to pull back the hair that fell in his face. It doesn’t really matter. Nothing that she does matters now, because his eyes are still vacant.
***
She’s sitting on the verge of his desk and drawing something in the sketchbook supported by her knee. Her braids swing back and forth as she tilts her head, checking the perspective.
“I heard it was you, not a Chuck, who carried me there,” she says, raising her eyes at him. They are different now, violet with the Shimmer that’s keeping her alive. “Was it really?”
“Yes,” he sighs. He should have expected his people would talk about it. But somehow it does not feel harmful. It might have saved Jinx, that he wasted no time – and it makes grin. To think he had been so close to losing that grin, forever.
“Uh-huh.” She studies him for a moment, then gets back to drawing. He hears her pens scraping tirelessly against the paper while he reads what Sevika has brought him.
A longer while passes before Jinx speaks again. “Wouldn’t that be cute?”
He turns in his chair, only to find her still in the same position – leaning to her knee, her other leg on the desk. “What exactly?”
“If I have died while you were carrying me. I did die that night, after all.”
“How do you know this?”
She winks at him playfully, and improperly, considering the matter they are discussing. “You’d be surprised how talkative the Doctor gets when you’re convincing enough.”
“You didn’t hurt him, did you?” he asks cautiously. “We need him, still.”
Jinx leans back, tipping back her head as she rolls her eyes. “You think I don’t know that? Don’t you trust me any?”
Like no one else in the world. “Of course I do. But I know exactly how annoying he can get when he isn’t the one holding the lancet.”
“Oh. You do? I suppose you do.” She straightens and casts another long glance at him before focusing back on her work. “I forgot to ask him if it was then, though,” she whines, concentrating on the sketchbook. “Do you know?”
“I don’t.”
He does. It was then – must have been. He’s never going to forget the fact she did stop breathing while he carried her. He’s never going to forget how it felt to see her move, afterwards; how it feels to see her now, tucking a pencil behind her ear along with a lock of hair.
“Hm.” She looks disappointed. “Doesn’t matter. I might ask him for the exact timing the next time I get the chance.” She giggles. “I still think it’d be cute.”
Sweet naivety. Silco doesn’t share that wonderfully bright outlook but decides not to correct it and smiles a little, back at her. Just when he is ready to return to his reading, she catches the back of his chair and stops it from turning.
“Look.” She tears out a sketchbook’s page and thrusts it towards him. “I drew us.”
They do resemble themselves, albeit in her own style – the colours too bright, the lines sharp and jagged. She pictured it as she just said she imagined it – him carrying her, fluorescent fumes in the background, her own eyes made into cartoonish x-es that he has learnt symbolise being dead.
He stares at the drawing for a little too long, enough so for her to fidget impatiently.
“You don’t like it, do you? I’m too old or something—” she reaches to take it from him.
He snatches it away from her grasp. “Now, now, who said any of that.” He shakes his head, smoothening out the page before he folds it and puts it into his pocket.
***
She’s done a lot of dumb things in her life, she knows that. Everybody knows that. Amongst that – shot him, of course.
All the stupid things she has ever said are hardly the thing on her mind when she’s crying by his side, holding a hand the Doctor “can’t be sure he’ll ever move, again. If he wakes up at all.”
She’s even found the drawing, in his pocket.
It was tucked with two others under the lining that she tore through, because she had to tear through something (and he had asked her not to do that to her skin). One of them is from a birthday of his, she remembers. He taught her to shoot, that day. The other must be the first one she ever gave to him, because the lines are pretty crude, like a kid drew them. Yet he kept it. He kept it, he kept it, and he might never look at them again—
But yes, the stupid things she has said are the last ones on her mind right now. She has so much else to do, between Sevika’s new arm and Sevika’s new army (Sevika’s and HERS, though it’s only Jinx’s because he would have wanted that).
So, she doesn’t really get what he’s referring to, when the first words he says – coughs up, rather, are, “Do you still think that cute? Because I, from experience—” he has to pause, all breath pushed out of his lungs as she squeezes him tight, “—disagree.”