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Violet was really going to do it. She really will. It’s just that between the split-second blinks between the hot rush of adrenaline exploding in the neurons between her bloodied teeth, she saw her sister.
Truly saw her, the baby sister she once had. Not—Jinx. Not whatever monster she had become in the seven years of sleep where Vi had been locked away in some hidden pocket of the world, floating around, not really a person in a body. Not really there. The days that passed by in Stillwater had felt like a dream within a dream, anchored solely by the hazy watercolour image of baby blue hair and tooth-gapped grin: Powder, Powder, Powder.
Somewhere by the end of the first year Vi had stopped saying her name. They’d all thought that Powder was some kind of substance, some sort of drug that she’d been addicted to, and Vi didn’t bother to tell them what she’d meant. She didn’t want to. It was weakness most of all, really; if they’d found out she had something worth living for who knows what they would do. If they found her. If she was even still alive—Powder was so small, so clueless; she’d had to follow someone around or she’d get lost. She’d had to hide behind someone’s body or she’d get scared. Or cold. Or hungry. She was so small. If Vi thinks about it too much she’d get sick, so she doesn’t. But she’d never forgotten.
Most of the time she imagined Powder still small, which isn’t what Powder would’ve wanted, but Vi finds herself stuck on it, again and again and again—the dozen little hairpins stuck everywhere in her hair or it’d fly all over the place, glimmering under the sun in reflection like little stars. She imagines the waxy trails of crayon all over her tiny hands, imagines her sweet-ringing laughter, imagines her young and lovely and unburdened. Imagines her with a smile that reaches the eyes. Imagines her grinning, showing off the gap from the loose tooth Vi had to pull for her when she was six; it bled so much that Vander had to intervene, this little girl wailing into his arms, chin smeared all over with blood, her older sister trailing behind her with a guilty wince.
That night she’d helped wipe up the blood from Powder’s quivering lips and whispered to her don’t cry and she hated it. Violet doesn’t want to see her bleed ever again if she could help it, and she knows it's a damn impossible feat down here, but she’d promised anyway. And now she’s hitting her and hitting her and hitting the fuck out of her like she’d meant it, wants to mean it, but she doesn’t mean it until she has her pinned under and ready to take. This time Violet was really going to do it. She knew she had to.
The first time she did it she raised her flesh fist and hit her like she’d meant it, grabbed her soft baby cheeks and screamed at her that she was a jinx. The second time she did it her fists were mechanical so that she doesn’t feel; the weight of it, the wrongness of it. She was ready. She was going to do it. Violet was going to kill a murderer.
And then the hazy watercolour vision shifts and ripples, blue and purple, bleeding into each other. And then she saw her baby sister.
Powder coughs and spat and tells her to go on. She’s ready. Her mechanical fist is wrapped around her little neck but she can still feel the veins beating frantically and she doesn’t understand how. Doesn’t understand why it’s—why it's Powder, lying there, panting her frantic breaths until it evens out in defeat. In acceptance. She just slumped still and laid there, this little girl with the choppy hair and bloodied tooth gap and the dozen little hairpins stuck everywhere, all reflecting the image of her; fist raised, bared teeth, some wild animal prepared to sacrifice its young. Violet, her first raised and ready, she’s ready, she was going to do it.
And then Powder sighs “I’m glad it's you,” in relief, like she’d always been ready to die, and Violet feels the same old electric ache seizing her chest when she watches her eyes flutter closed. “Had to be you.”
And it was Powder. It has always been Powder. And Violet fears if she waits a second longer she would still be staring at her baby sister’s eyes until she no longer remembers what monster Powder had become. She closes her eyes and raises the fist and cries out the ache that’ll haunt her for the rest of her life, and she’s ready, they were ready, she was going to do it—and then Powder shouts No!— and it was all that Violet ever needed. She can't. She can't.
When Violet opens her eyes she sees the hot barrel of a gun pointed right between her eyes and another little girl with furious eyes, ready to shoot back.