Chapter Text
It all begins one day at lunch.
The day starts out good. The food is passable. Finn’s goons are nowhere to be found, probably skipping class. Ekko finds himself in an armwrestling match with Rowan when Eve taps him on the shoulder.
Rowan slams his fist onto the lunch table. “Ha!”
Ekko manages to keep his eye roll from being too dramatic. “Gloat while you can.” At his side, Eve looks disturbed. Wordlessly, she points to a corner of the cafeteria where Ekko can make out a thin figure standing in the shadow of the drink machine, staring right at him.
He sits for a long moment. Then he stands up.
“Hey,” Alli says, reaching towards him, “you don’t have to go.”
He chews the inside of his cheek, and it draws blood. “I know.”
Ekko throws the inedible remnants of his lunch in the trash and walks toward the drink machine, hands in his pockets like he actually has money. Just because Finn’s little underlings aren’t around, that doesn’t mean doing this won’t spell trouble for him if he’s too obvious. He stares at the cans of soda, pretending to deliberate, and asks, “How long you plan on staring?”
Jinx pushes off the wall. Her mouth, which had been curled into an ugly snarl, takes on a sickeningly-sweet grin. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Spit it out.”
“This?” she asks, sticking out her tongue to show a wad of bubblegum.
Ekko can’t appear too affected without giving her a foothold. He rolls his eyes and turns to head back to the lunch table. “Whatever.”
“Hey,” Jinx says once his back is turned. “Stay away from 32nd tonight.”
“Why?”
She scoffs. Her voice drips with derision. “Your loss.”
He doesn’t turn around to look. By the time he’d be able to ask another question, she’ll be gone anyway.
↯
Ekko was starting to think the bell would never ring.
He’s in honors classes, which unfortunately puts him in close contact with Jinx all day. Most of his other friends are in the regular classes, and while this isn’t a problem normally—just about anyone who’d be willing to jump him isn’t taking calculus AB, and Jinx usually acts like he’s not there—today had been different. In the two classes he’d had with her in the afternoon, Ekko had been able to feel Jinx’s eyes on his back constantly. He still can’t shake the feeling as he walks out the front doors of the school.
He’s overthinking this. Before long, he lets his walk fall into practiced nonchalance, stuffing his hands in his pockets and heading south of the highway like he would any day. But the feeling of eyes on his back doesn’t cease, and Ekko isn’t willing to turn around and confront Jinx on the bridge between the two halves of the city. One encounter with her is more than enough for a month, let alone a day. A lifetime, even. Then he’d be able to let her stay dead and in his memories instead of having to feel her follow him around like a ghost.
The eyes are still on him when he makes it down to the Undercity. He needs to get to the base. Seeing Jinx, let alone having to talk to her, makes his stomach turn. He’s spent so many nights sleepless and hoping he could do something to get through to her. A part of him still wants to try every time she enters his field of vision. Then he remembers Eve’s broken arm, or Hawke’s bruises after getting jumped on the way home, and rage turns his stomach instead of guilt.
He wanders around aimlessly, stopping by Jericho’s shop and a few other places until he can be reasonably sure Jinx has given up on following him. The last thing he would ever want to do is bring her towards the base. He doesn’t have the wherewithal for any more funerals.
The base is hard to find, hidden as it is by tall fences and overgrown vines. This is an area that was bought by some Piltie real estate developer and then never used. But in it, at the bottom of a hill, sits the biggest tree Ekko has ever seen—one of the few trees this side of the interstate. The trunk is wide and the branches fan out, blanketing the bottom of the hill from above. When sunlight filters through the leaves, Ekko thinks he might have found peace. He breaks into a run once he’s climbed the fence and slides the last of the way down the hill. The others are already there, and so are about a dozen kids from the elementary school nearby. Ekko’s face can’t help but brighten upon seeing them, but before he can join them, his attention is taken away.
Alli rushes up to him, her brown, braided hair swinging behind her as she grabs him by the arm. “Where were you?”
He extricates himself from her so he can set his backpack down. “Had to lose Jinx.”
“She was following you?”
“Past tense.” Ekko knows nothing he can say will make Alli feel better, because last time Alli had close contact with Jinx she had nearly wound up with shrapnel in her face, but he tries anyway. “I lost her long before I came here.”
Alli rolls her eyes. “Nothing I say will change your mind about that freak. But whatever. We think we found out where the shimmer factory is. Come on.”
As they walk, Alli goes on about how she’s been coming up with this map based on tracking the movements of Silco’s lackeys. It’s somewhere near the harbor, probably, she says as Ekko waves to a group of kids kicking around an old soccer ball. His eyes drift to two figures sitting by the base of the tree, near the mural. Rowan’s holding a kid’s hand—maybe a middle schooler—and whispering in soft tones. Ekko feels his jaw tense. Watching people come down from shimmer highs is never easy. It’s worse when it’s children.
(Once upon a time, Ekko didn’t think he could hate anything more than Piltover. Then he lost half the people he cherished most in one night, and he’d truly learned the depths of loathing.)
He manages to keep a cool head. His father taught him that. He likes to say that decisions made in anger are the ones most likely to turn into regrets. Ekko follows Alli the rest of the way, into the little shed they’ve built on one side of the tree. He imagines that one day they might even make a treehouse—he’d always seen those on TV when he was little and been disappointed he didn’t have any trees to put one in—but the shed is a nice start.
Scar and Eve are already inside, Eve adjusting her sling awkwardly and Scar scowling as he looks through a manual for something. Ekko greets them both with a wave as he plops down on the green chair, his favorite that his friends have silently left open for him.
Alli rummages around until she finds a big piece of paper, taking it to a crate that serves as a table. “There,” she says, laying it out. She’d printed a map of the city and marked on it in various colors, labeled for the different movements of people in Silco’s circle. Surprisingly, Jinx isn’t on there. Perhaps Silco deems her too important to be in the streets pushing shimmer, but that doesn’t square with the last encounter Ekko and his friends had had with her.
Is something changing? And if so, with Silco or Jinx?
With a shake of his head, Ekko pulls himself out of the past. “What next?”
“It’s your call, boss man,” Eve teases. In the corner, Scar grunts.
There are too many unknowns, and at the end of the day, they’re still just a bunch of street kids. “Let’s sit on it. They don’t need to know we’re on to them.”
“For how long?” Alli asks, failing to hide a flicker of anger in her eyes.
“Not too long. But rushing in there will get us in bigger trouble than anything we’ve seen before. And we can’t do anything about shimmer if we wind up dead.” Cool head. His list of regrets is already too long.
Alli shakes her head, but Eve seems accepting. Scar simply grunts again. Ekko knows that everyone here is tired of shimmer, but he also knows that getting rid of it can’t be simple. Even if they manage to mess up production, the minds behind shimmer will just make more. The power they’ll need to bring Silco to task is beyond what they can do.
Once they finish updating each other on anything else that seems relevant, Ekko decides to take a breather, playing soccer with some of the younger kids who stay while their parents and older siblings are still at work. Ekko wants to find work; he keeps telling his parents that school isn’t hard enough to keep him busy all evening, but they insist that he focus on his studies. Like he could focus while watching them work themselves to an early grave.
He kicks the soccer ball a little too hard, and it hits a third grader in the stomach. Ekko apologizes profusely and holds her hand while she cries.
Maybe that’s enough soccer for now.
The mural is his next stop. Eve comes up behind him, gazing up at the mural with a sad look on her face. Ekko can’t help but steal glances at her arm in the sling.
(More regrets. More anger. He’s really going to lose his head one of these days if he isn’t careful.)
As he watches her face, the memories of how she got that broken arm flood back. Ekko and his friends are strategic—relatively speaking—about getting tangled up in Silco’s web, but selling shimmer near the middle school had been a hard line for them. Whatever the drug did to adults it did twice as much to kids. Ekko had not been surprised to see Silco hit this new low. He had been surprised to see Jinx there with the rest of the goons.
The memory is splotches of bright color and shades of anger. It’s fuzzy in his head, but that’s a good thing. It means that when he’s kept awake at night by the memories, they’re less awful than they might otherwise be.
Eve blinks tears out of her eyes. “You know, when she was holding my arm, I was really worried you were going to be painting my portrait up there.”
There’s no asking who “she” is. Ekko holds out an arm, and Eve leans into his side. “I’m sorry I wasn’t fast enough to protect you.”
“It’s not your fault,” she says softly. “But what are we going to do now? I think SIlco’s had enough of us. And we can’t just go charging in, but we might not have enough time to wait.”
He’ll kill Silco before he lets him have this place. But beyond that? Ekko had never been one to plan for the future until a year ago. Until he’d found this place, he hadn’t even considered what graduating high school would look like. He had just assumed he would be dead or in Stillwater by twenty-five. But now he has a good thing going, and he’d be stupid to do anything that keeps him from helping his people.
One of the elementary kids runs up and tugs on Eve’s shirt, asking for help with reading homework. Ekko starts to follow her until he feels a hand on his shoulder and turns around to see Scar. The older man falls in step beside him, his seemingly-permanent scowl not wavering.
“Heard you had a run-in with the Blue Menace.”
Ekko kind of wants to call her The Blue Meanie, but the Beatles reference is a little too cartoonish for what Jinx is to him. Instead he says, “Yeah. She told me to avoid the area around 32nd tonight.”
“Why?”
He shrugs. “Didn’t say. We don’t have any business over that way, so I didn’t mention it earlier.”
Scar folds his arms. “Could be a trap.”
“Like how? Something’s gonna happen to the whole city except 32nd?” Ekko goes to roll his eyes, but Scar whacks him on the back of the head.
“It could be something we need to see.”
“Maybe. Jinx sounded pretty serious, though.” He hates having to say her name. It tastes bitter every time it passes his tongue. “But even if Silco is doing something important there tonight, is it a good idea to show our faces?”
The answer is obvious, so Scar drops the subject.
Ekko almost regrets bringing it up. He doesn’t like thinking about Jinx. He barely talked to her, but she’s still ruined his mood. It’s worse because the day started good. Since lunch, it’s gotten nothing but weirder, like a blue-haired vengeful spirit has shown up to curse him with minor inconveniences and justified paranoia. A cloud hangs over Ekko for the rest of the day, fogging up his mind and making it hard to focus on anything. When he trudges home, he does nothing but homework before collapsing into bed, utterly exhausted.
He’s not going anywhere but bed, and certainly not to 32nd Street.
↯
Heat sears Ekko’s face.
An officer grabs him and pulls him back behind the barricade, ignoring his wails as the car bursts into even more flames. He’s already lost Benzo tonight. He can’t. He can’t do this.
“How unlucky,” a voice says. It pricks at Ekko’s ears, vaguely familiar.
He turns, slowly, and sees Jinx, not Powder, standing behind him, the flames from the car fire flickering in her eyes. Then her lips split into that signature manic grin of hers, and laughter rips from her throat.
Ekko covers his ears, but it doesn’t do anything. In fact, the noise just seems to grow louder. Does anyone else hear this? A car accident has just happened, and Jinx is just standing here, laughing.
Laughing, and laughing, and laughing and laughing and—
He jolts awake.
There’s no fire. No laughter. No Jinx. Just the dark and silence of his bedroom. He rolls over to grab his phone. 2:29. He rolls back over and stares at the ceiling, feeling his chest rise and fall. Eventually, when he’s calmed enough, he goes to get some water. His father has collapsed on the couch, coat still in his hands. Ekko hangs up the coat and places a blanket over him before returning to his bedroom.
Ekko drinks the water in two gulps and tries to decide whether going back to sleep is worth it or not. Jinx is worse in real life than she is in his nightmares. It’s probably a good idea to avoid falling asleep in school, where she will actually be. The thought isn’t comforting, but Ekko manages to get back to sleep by sheer force of will if nothing else.
The next time Ekko wakes up, he finds out that 32nd Street has been shot up overnight.