Chapter Text
It would almost be too easy to kill Vi Kiramman.
She was easy prey. Her head was down and her guard was too, and she was so emotionally compromised that Lux doubted that Vi would be able to react to an attack anything like fast enough.
How would Jinx do it? That’s right. Low and to the side. Zaunites always come in low and to the side. Blade to the back, left of the spine and fourth lumbar down. Vi would bleed out like a stuck pig on top of her bitch of a wife. It would take her just long enough to die that Lux could whisper Jinx’s name into Vi’s ear, so she would know why she was dying.
But that would be too easy. Far too easy and far too quick.
“I came as soon as I heard,” Lux said quietly as she shut the door behind her. “How are you holding up?”
Pommel to the back of the skull maybe. Stun her and tie her up. Cut off her hand maybe. No. Caitlyn’s. Cut that miserable trigger finger off and make Vi watch.
“I’m uh…” Vi started, then trailed off and shook her head. “Fuck, sorry I uhm, I dunno. Sorry, Cupcake’s better at this kinda stuff than me.”
“It’s alright to not be alright, you know,” Lux said as she moved around to sit down on the spare chair across from Vi.
Smile. Smile like you mean it.
“No one expects you to be alright when the person you love most of all gets hurt.”
Vi looked up at her, and Lux prayed that her smile was at least something approximating normal. For all she knew, she was smiling like Jinx; ear to ear, with wide eyes and violence lighting them from behind.
Lux struggled not to sigh in relief when Vi smiled back. She must look at least semi-normal.
“Yeah, I uh, I guess that’s true, huh?” Vi shook her head and looked at Caitlyn. Vi never once let go of her hand.
Caitlyn looked bad, there was no getting around that, but the doctors had assured both Vi and Piltover at large that the Sheriff would make a full recovery. Not without a nasty scar though. The wound on her side had been brutal, Lux could tell that much from the amount of stained packing on it.
“All told, she’s fairly lucky,” Lux continued, earning a frown from Vi. Lux gave her a wan smile and pointed to the wound. “See? If the shots had taken her even an inch further into her midsection she would have perforated bowels or worse. Sepsis would have set in fast, too fast for Piltovan doctors. Maybe even too fast for a master Demacian chirurgeon.”
With every word, Vi grew paler, and Lux’s face hurt as she forced herself to keep her beatific smile plastered on. The pain that Vi was wearing was nothing like enough for Lux, though.
“My family has been Demacian military for generations, remember, so I’ve seen the gamut,” Lux said gently.
“Y-Yeah, I guess ya have,” Vi replied, although her voice had taken on an especially hollow tone.
“You’ve seen it get bad too, though, haven’t you? Growing up in Zaun?”
Vi nodded. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “Well, sort of…it was just the Undercity back then, and I did a lot more growing up in Stillwater than I did in Zaun.”
The prison? That was new. “What did you do?” Lux asked.
“Nothing,” Vi said. “It was the old sheriff, a spineless shit-heel who licked the boots of a murdering sociopath named Silco.” Vi’s face twisted in grief and rage as she turned back to Caitlyn’s prone, comatose form. “The same bastard who took my little sister and turned her into…into Jinx.”
If Vi had been looking at her then, at that moment, Lux would have had to kill her. For the first time that she could remember, her mask truly cracked. It was only for a moment—barely a heartbeat—but in that span of time her blade was already a fingers-width drawn from its scabbard, and even Lux could tell her expression had blown wide open.
With a supreme act of will, Lux let her blade fall silently back into its scabbard and schooled her face to beatific neutrality as Vi looked back up at her.
“Sorry,” Vi said. “Just family baggage, I’m sure you don’t give a shit."
“Don’t be,” Lux replied. She didn’t trust herself to move without cutting Vi’s throat. Not yet. “And you know that’s not fair, about family baggage, I mean…we all have it, more or less.”
Vi snorted softly and leaned back against her chair.
“Cupcake…she really admires you, y’know? Says you’ve been a soldier since the cradle.”
“I’m a Crownguard,” Lux said. “We born with blades in our hands, or so the story goes.”
“Oof, I feel sorry for your ma, then,” Vi joked, and Lux imagined jamming her blade straight between the woman’s teeth and nailing that cocky smile to the wall behind her.
What she actually did was laugh, and it sounded shrill and false to her ears. Nothing like the laughter she shared with Jinx.
“Speaking of family I…I had no idea that Jinx was your sister.” True and not true. When she’d learned that Jinx had blood family in the League it didn’t leave many possible options.
Assuming her family was either Piltovan or Zaunite, and removing the non-humans from the equation, process of elimination left little to chance, and after Jinx’s quip about a ‘family reunion’ following the intervention by Piltover’s finest, those odds collapsed down to one: Violet Kiramman. Reformed criminal, Zaunite immigrant to Piltover and wife to the sheriff. Local hero of the people.
Miserable, concrete-skulled bitch.
“It’s a long story,” Vi said softly. “I don’t know even know all’a it. I was in Stillwater for a long time, and between then and now…shit, I dunno, all I do know is that my baby sister wasn’t always that way.”
“People change, Aspects knows I have,” Lux said, and that much, at least, rang absolutely true.
Vi shrugged. “Yeah, but I keep hoping that, buried somewhere under all that crazy, my sister is still there.” She laid a hand on Caitlyn’s brow and brushed a few strands of hair from her face. “Cait thinks I’m just torturing myself. That all that’s left is just Jinx, but I keep hopin’, y’know?”
Torture? Torture was restraining herself from descending into blind psychosis and painting the entire room they were standing in red as she listened to Vi talk about Jinx like she was an animal. Like was worth less than some brat from the streets of Zaun who hadn’t existed anywhere but her big sister’s diseased brain for over a decade at least.
“People change,” is what Lux actually forced past her own lips. “Maybe Caitlyn is right. Believe me, I have a family too, but I also have duties and responsibilities. Maybe it’s time to accept that there was never anything about Jinx to fix.”
Because there wasn’t. There would never be.
Jinx was perfect just the way she was.
“Yeah, maybe,” Vi muttered. “Still feels cruel.”
Drawing back, Lux settled her hand back on the pommel of her blade. Vi wasn’t looking at her, her head was dipped down and her eyes were still fixed on her wounded wife, so Lux indulged in a moment of weakness and allowed her mask to slip off.
Her lips peeled back and the edges of her mouth stretched, her eyes widened as strain and hate settled heavily over her brow, and her fingers curled tightly around the leather-wrapped grip of her sword
All Vi had to do was look up and she would see everything, and Lux wouldn’t have to hide anymore. No more masks. If only she would look up.
“I know,” Lux said softly. “But your job is to protect people, Vi, and if you can’t do your job, then you should have stayed in Stillwater.”
The moment passed, the mask slipped back on. The mask called ‘Soldier’ the mask called ‘Operative’.
The mask called ‘Demacian’.
Vi looked up and she would see the hard, marble lines of a loyal Demacian warrior whose bloodline stretched back to the founding of the nation. She would see blue eyes—the Crownguard eyes—made flinty with determination and zeal.
She would see precisely what Lux wanted her to see.
After a long moment, Vi swallowed, then nodded, and said, “you’re a hard-ass woman, Lux.”
“I’m a Crownguard,” she said, tilting the corner of mouth up in a facsimile of a smirk. “Loyalty and duty above all.”
“Wish I could just switch it all off like that,” Vi said bitterly.
Briefly, a new feeling cracked through Lux’s heart. It wasn’t hate or rage or madness. It was almost…pity. It moved her to say something as she turned on her heel to leave, to speak a few words over her shoulder. Something that surprised even her.
“No,” Lux said as she moved to the door. “You don’t.”
By the time Lux got back to the flat she shared with Jinx, her rage had ebbed back to a sullen ember of anger and a sick sensation of helplessness in her stomach.
“I’m home…” Lux said, and even though she knew there would be no answer she still listened for it anyway.
Kicking the door shut, Lux slipped her cloak off, hung it up, kicked off her boots, and moved through the den towards the bedroom. She hadn’t wanted to leave, but she’d needed to make some kind of show after the collapse of the dam. Piltover was in an uproar, two whole districts were without power, and the Sheriff had been put in the hospital by 'Loose Cannon' Jinx.
Leaving Jinx alone in her condition hadn’t been an option, so Lux had had to call up yet another favor.
She braced herself as she pushed the door open.
“Oh, hey.” Ekko looked up from the bedside where he was sitting next to Jinx. “That didn’t take long.”
“No, but it had to be done,” Lux said as she kipped up onto the bed and slid next to Jinx.
A day and a half, and she still hadn’t woken up.
She was wrapped almost head to toe in bandages and splints. There was hardly a bone in her body that wasn’t fractured or broken. She owe Ekko more than she could say for all the help he’d given her the night he’d dragged the two of them back home.
He had stayed for hours, helping to set breaks and stitch wounds. Helping Lux patch Jinx up inasmuch as they could while Lux prayed silently that Jinx wouldn’t need more extreme medical attention. The only person she would be able to go to in that dire circumstance was a certain mad chemist in the heart of Zaun, and with Jinx unconscious that journey would have been fraught, to say the least.
“Any change?”
Ekko shook his head. “This is the most peaceful I think I’ve ever seen’er, and that’s counting when we were kids,” he joked quietly, then sighed. “I kinda prefer the loud version.”
“Me too.” Lux sidled closer to Jinx and laid a hand on her wrist, just below the severed stump of her left hand.
Everything felt so much colder and so much quieter without Jinx. Lux had known for a long time that, theoretically, if she ever lost Jinx, she would probably lose her mind, too. The past twenty-four hours or so had only driven that home. Jinx was going to be fine, she was sure of it. Given enough time, Jinx would wake up and things would…would be better.
It was hard to remember that while she watched Jinx take shallow, uneven breaths as she laid in their bed on a waterfall of blue hair with her eyes closed and her hand missing.
It was hard not to just lose her mind right then and there.
“Gotta say, I wasn’t expecting I’d ever be here again,” Ekko said.
“Where?”
“Sittin’ next to her,” he nodded at Jinx, “keepin’ an eye on her after she did something stupid and got hurt. She was a uh…heh, well, let’s just say we used to get into a lot of trouble, and back then her bombs never actually worked right.”
To Lux’s own surprise, she smiled. Part of her had always wondered if she would feel jealous of people who had known Jinx in her younger years. Jealous of them knowing her in a way that Lux couldn’t.
Now, though, she knew the truth.
That wasn’t Jinx. That was someone else. They knew that person, and they knew them well. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with that.
But it wasn’t Jinx.
She was the only one who knew Jinx.
“She’s not broken, you know,” Lux said quietly. “Not really…she’s just different.”
“She’s killed a lot of people.”
“I’ve probably killed more,” Lux replied.
Ekko snorted derisively. “Yeah, well, you probably did it because it was your job, y’know?”
“So?” Lux looked up at him with tired eyes. “Does killing people because someone on a distant throne tells me it has to be done, and because I didn’t care enough to ask if it was true, make me a better person than her?”
“I…” Ekko started, then closed his mouth and lowered his head. “I dunno.”
“It’s all the same…killing for a reason, killing for no reason…it’s all just killing. A hundred years from now, no one will ask what the difference was.”
Ekko slumped and sighed, then ran his fingers through his pale dreadlocks and nodded. He looked, simultaneously, older and younger than he had any right to. He looked like someone who had worn the weight of the world for much longer than he hadn’t.
In a way, Lux pitied him. He cared so much. He cared about Zaun and its people, even when Zaun didn’t care about itself. Even when the dark undercity was busy killing itself, he was trying to save it because he believed that it could be better. That they could all do better. He believed in that despite years and years of his own city doing its damndest to prove him wrong.
In a way, that made him just as crazy as Jinx. Maybe everyone in Zaun was a little bit crazy.
“I’ve never seen her like she is with you,” Ekko said after a long moment.
“What do you mean?”
“She looked different.” Ekko rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “She looked…I dunno, good? Happy? Happier than most Zaunites, I mean.”
“She loves me,” Lux said. “And I love her…more than I can ever put into words.”
“Bet she could put it into words,” Ekko joked, and Lux smiled.
“She did,” Lux replied.
Ekko quirked an eyebrow up. “Nah, I mean like, in gutlau, y’know? In Zaun we—”
“I know,” Lux interrupted him, then turned to Jinx and said, “I love you…” and kissed her cheek.
When she looked back up at Ekko, she was expecting surprise. What she wasn’t expecting was wide-eyed shock and a dropped jaw. It was dramatic enough that Lux sat up and frowned.
“What?”
“That's what that was?” Ekko whispered.
“What do you—?”
“Back in the dam! That's what you said?” Ekko leaned forward and narrowed his eyes. "Say it again."
Lux frowned. "Why?"
"Please?"
Shaking her head, Lux turned back to Jinx and said it again, curling her tongue around the familiar gutlau syllables. The words that meant that without her there was no light. Because Jinx was Lux’s light as much as Lux was her own.
“Holy shit.” Ekko started to laugh as he leaned back in his chair and clapped a hand over his eyes as his laughter descended into something almost manic.
Lux waited for his mirth to subside, and when it finally did Ekko sat up and dragged in long, ragged breaths of air as he stared at Jinx with a new expression on his face.
“You really are crazy, huh?” Ekko whispered in a tone low enough that Lux barely caught it.
“What?” Lux asked. “What was that all about?”
“You’re not Zaunite, so you don’t know, huh? I guess she never explained.” Ekko said.
“Explained what?”
“Lemme guess, those words, right? They basically mean ‘I love you’?”
“Y-Yes, of course,” Lux said. “I mean, what it actually means is—”
“Don’t!” Ekko held up a hand sharply. “You don’t tell anyone what it means! Ever! That’s the point!”
“The point of what?!”
Lux looked back at Jinx in concern. It wasn’t often she was caught off-guard, but the way Ekko was talking was getting to her.
“Sorry, just…I wasn’t expecting this, that’s all,” Ekko said as he relaxed. “She shoulda toldja but, shit, I don’t know if it woulda even occurred to her to tell ya what it meant. Or maybe she was just worried.”
“Ekko, please.” Lux sat up fully and looked him in the eye. “What are you talking about?”
Ekko sighed and shrugged. “Fuck it, okay,” he looked over at Jinx and grimaced. “This is your fault, you oughta told her.” Looking back at Lux, he said, “Zaun is a weird sorta place, right? People don’t stay together often, but when they do, they share a phrase. Something only they know. Something that means what they mean to each other, right?”
“Right.” Jinx had explained that much inasmuch as she explained anything. “And?”
“Don’t you get it? Don't you get what that means to a Zaunite? Forget ‘love’, we don’t even trust! We don’t trust anybody! Much less other Zaunites!” Ekko’s expression softened as he rubbed at his face, and when he looked back up at Lux it was with an almost impish smile.
“What does it mean, then?” Lux asked.
“It means Zaunites aren’t big on rituals or any of the fancy stuff that happens topside,” Ekko said. "But the phrase? That’s the closest thing to sacred that we’ve got, y’know? Sharing a phrase? That’s something brand new and it lasts forever because that’s what words do, okay?”
“O-Okay,” Lux said, feeling an odd hollow starting to open in her chest. “So…So that…”
“So sharing a phrase is saying that you want to be with that person forever, get it?” Ekko pressed. “For. Ever.”
“Oh.”
“As far as Zaun is concerned,” Ekko continued with a dry laugh, “that was basically Jinx asking you to marry her, and when you said it back...”
Lux swallowed thickly and turned to look back down at Jinx. She saw the woman in a new light. How much courage must that have taken? Back then, and even up to that current hour, Jinx was certain that she was broken. That there was something missing from her. But she was just as sure that Lux loved her in spite of it.
In that, she was, perhaps, a bit wrong. Lux didn’t love Jinx in spite of anything. Lux loved Jinx for everything. There wasn’t a single thing about her that Lux didn’t love with all of her heart.
“I’m…married?” Lux whispered.
“I mean, s’far as anyone downsides is concerned, yeah,” Ekko replied. “So uh…congrats, I guess? If I’d known I’da brought a bottle of something strong.”
Married. She was married. By Zaunite custom at least, and really, was that any less valid than the trumped-up rituals of Demacia or Piltover?
“You okay?
“My mother would lose her mind,” Lux said with a weak laugh.
“Yeah, well, I’m kinda still trying to wrap my head around it, too,” Ekko admitted. “But she uh…she looks good with you, y’know? Better than I’ve ever seen’er.” Looking back up at Lux, he smiled. “You’re good for her, Crownguard.”
“And she’s good for me,” Lux said as tears threatened at the edges of her eyes, and she reached out to brush her fingers against Jinx’s pale cheek. “I love her so much.”
Ekko nodded, then stood and stretched. “A’ight, I gotta bounce, but uh, lemme know when she’s back on her feet, I guess? I’ll poke around and see about fixing up her hand. I know some folks.”
“Thank you, for everything, and for that. That means a lot,” Lux said, looking back up at him.
“No worries.” Ekko shrugged and smiled. “Call it a wedding present.”
Like Jinx, Ekko moved with quiet efficiency, pulling on his cloak and owl-mask, and flipping up his hood. He left through the window—maybe Zaunites are just averse to doors—and the last thing Lux heard was the faint hum of his hoverboard.
He was a good man, and Lux found herself absurdly thankful she hadn’t had to kill him.
Turning back to Jinx, Lux smiled broadly and leaned down to kiss her cheek.
“I’m going to be so mad at you for not telling me we’re married,” Lux whispered. “But later…for now, I love you.” she whispered the last words in gutlau as she settled down to lay beside Jinx.
Soon, she would be awake. Lux was sure of it.