Chapter Text
“You know, I learned from someone…very special, that no matter what happened in the past, it’s never too late to build something new. Someone worth building it for.”
She can’t exactly place the expression on his face when he says that, but she can see his breathing struggling to catch up to the words in his mouth, his hands tightly clenched around the cylindrical machine around his torso.
In it: tiny spinning monkeys, banging their cymbals together in the radiant glow of that Viktor’s weird new hextech.
Jinx has never forgotten the look of the monkey she’d built way back then. She could never bring herself to recreate it, but this has its same build. It’s also unlike any of the Firelight’s vaguely impractical yet economical engineering. She’s unsure if she has the energy to ask.
Ekko, behind it, shoulders heaving. Hand ready to pull a chain on the machine, his eyes locked onto hers. There’s blood on his cheeks she doesn’t remember being there a few seconds ago.
Jinx looks at the dark abyss below them, then at the little bomb in her hands. She toys with the metal circlet beside it, but her eyes glance back to Ekko.
He hasn’t looked anywhere else, and there’s that look in his eyes still, entirely alien to any way he has ever looked at Jinx before. Something about the look fills her with an acute ache different than the resigned numbness accompanying her.
Someone worth building it for…
It’s impossible not to think of Isha’s smiling face, her curious eyes, the way she broadened her shoulders and widened her stance after spending just a few days with Vi. Vi, still impulsive and distracted, still full of witty quips and rough gestures, still leaving out the best part of meals for Jinx to steal a bite. Sunlight on their faces. Breaking the cycle.
Everything Jinx wants right now is impossible to attain, but far beyond Zaun she knows of Ambessa’s rage and Viktor’s disciples and Piltover’s dinky little group of enforcers, spread far too thin against Ambessa’s organized army to be of any use.
Maybe there’s no hope for her yet. But she thinks of Vi again. The warmth of her body as she held her tight before Jinx locked her in her own cell. She thought breaking the cycle meant removing herself from the equation, but none of that will matter if something else destroys their little world.
Jinx takes a step back and Ekko exhales, loudly and obviously—the only sound in the entirety of her hideout. She lowers herself to sit on the cool metal below, crossing her legs, bomb still in her hands, abyss still below.
Her own happiness is impossible. Vi will surely end herself trying to keep Caitlyn and the home she loves safe. She’s hopeless without her.
Gently, Jinx places the decorated, blinking bomb on the distance between her and Ekko.
“…okay,” she says, voice a near-whisper.
Ekko takes the bomb and throws it far into the abyss. She never hears it land.
He doesn’t say anything for a long while. Part of Ekko yearns to break the silence, even if it’s with some useless comment or an attempt at a joke, or maybe something more important than asking what happened while he was gone or if he was even gone for long at all.
The other part is still clinging onto the Z-Drive’s chain in a decisively rational fear that anything he says will make Jinx decide to fling herself off the fan blade. Watching her swing her legs quietly makes him woefully yearn for the rails installed on Powder’s—
Their side profiles are almost the same, but he wouldn’t call them twins. Powder carried herself with an airy and effortless radiance. She was tan and her eyes were always expressive, even when she was trying to hide what she was thinking from him. Her lips—
Jinx is pale. She makes him think of the sick kids sheltered at the Firelight’s hideout, only now recovering from Zaun’s incessant darkness. There is—new—a glaring remnant of shimmer in and around her eyes, highlighting dulled blue cracks indicative of some sort of surgery. The dried makeup on her face looks days-old and smudged only through tears. He can trace their paths from Jinx’s eyes to her chin.
He can’t think of any conceivable thing that could’ve happened to get Jinx to this point. Even at her worst, at her most unstable, Jinx had always been an unbeatable force of nature. Her pain demanded others acknowledge it and she was more than happy to bring other people down to her level even if it meant her destruction as well.
This Jinx was ready to go silently. When Ekko expressed his desire to not get blown up, she tried jumping off the ledge instead. This Jinx is still the same Jinx who tried blowing them both up at the bridge. But there’s something else.
He deems it better not to ask right now.
“Can I—” Jinx looks over at him, eyes heavy, and his throat closes up. It’s hard to remember that he can keep her from dying as many times as necessary. Breaking the silence still feels impossible.
“Can I get closer to you?”
(As a matter of fact, he wants to close that distance and hold her tight in his arms and keep her there until she loses the tension in her shoulders and the sleeplessness in her eyes. She’s not Powder but he still remembers how she’d sink into his touch whenever he’d approach. He also knows he needs to stop thinking about her.)
Jinx just shrugs with a noncommittal hum. No quip. She doesn’t look at him. Ekko inches closer and lets go of the Z-Drive’s chain. Silence again. She’s been picking at her the skin beside her nails for a while now. Ekko’s eyes drift to it and he cringes and tears them away.
“…the monkeys,” is the first thing Jinx says after that uncomfortable bout of silence. Ekko tenses, untenses, looks at her, at the Z-Drive.
She finishes: “…where…?”
He never told Powder about who he actually was or why he was there. She was smart enough to suspect it, he bets, but she never pried and he never told, even if he could see the furrow of her brows and the burning curiosity in her eyes as he tread the new Zaun with confusion and wonder.
And saying ‘I went to an alternate universe where everything was better because your sister died’ feels like adding an offensive amount of salt to Jinx’s gaping wound.
“I had this dream,” he starts, and hears her disbelieving, wry snicker (a slight relief). “…where things were different.”
Jinx still doesn’t look at him.
“I realized that if I lingered on the dream, things would never change. And maybe they won’t ever be the way they were in that dream, but they could always be better. I could be better. The only thing I had to do was take a leap forward and accept that there’s a small possibility I might fall.”
Finally, she does look at him, and it’s still with weary and tired eyes. But her lips quirk up, gaze narrowed.
“That doesn’t explain why you copied my designs, genius.”
And he smiles back, annoyed and relieved all at once.
“Maybe I couldn’t take my mind off of you, either.”