Chapter Text
There is a moment, somewhere between the iterating, the theory, the fabricating, where Ekko’s head swims out from under the task. Where he takes a breath. And looks around.
The problem is, he doesn’t really remember the last time he was happy. There’s a hazy sense of it from when he was still working in Benzo’s shop. He thinks that’s what that was. But he can’t say for sure.
Powder’s asleep on the little cushy couch of her workshop. Her feet are propped up on a toolbox, her boots still on. Her mouth is slightly open. The sound of her breathing is audible from the other side of the cavern.
Ekko walks over and sits on the ground next to her. Some of her eyeliner has smudged onto her cheek.
The last time he saw her face was when he’d knocked her down on the bridge. When she’d glared at him, wild. When she was Jinx, and he thought it was his job to kill her, and he saw her afraid, and he couldn’t bring himself to do it, and he hated that he couldn’t do it, and he also hated that he ever even thought to kill her in the first place.
The last time before that was when they were kids.
Ekko blows out a breath.
Somewhere along the way, as he’s worked tirelessly to go back, the urgency has faded. The glow of the Firelight Tree seems less welcoming when the whole of the undercity is lit up with lamplight. The pride he took in carving out a scrap of peace in the midst of hell seems distant when he’s living in a world built by others. When he can set down his responsibilities. When he can be a kid whose only concern is convincing his girlfriend to help him win an engineering contest.
There’s a moment. As he’s looking at Powder’s sleeping face. And listening to her soft breathing. There’s a moment where he wonders if he really does need to go back.
Their eyes meet when the arcane is about to take him. Just minutes ago, she kissed him for the thousandth and the first time.
Then Ekko goes home.
He comes back in nearly the same moment he left. Even though it’s been days, weeks in the other dimension. The only thing the other Firelights ask him when he gets back is where the Professor went.
Ekko thinks about concentrations of arcane energy, the calculations he scrawled on a chalkboard. The amount of power it takes to warp reality enough for a person to slip through, in between, go somewhere else. What that does to a living physical being standing in the wrong spot.
He says something about the Professor deciding to stay in Piltover in his comfortable Academy position. His comfortable office. Safe.
Then he collapses into bed and sleeps like the dead.
Time passes.
Ekko falls back into the rhythm of the daily upkeep of the Firelights. There are generators to repair, hoverboards to maintain, and all manner of minor mechanical work for the machines keeping life going. He still hasn’t worked out what to do with the arcane corruption in the roots of the tree.
There’s not that many Firelights with enough knowledge to handle the more complex work, and there’s not really the time to train anyone up. For a long time, it was just him and Eve. Then Eve died. So he handled it alone. It became more manageable when the Professor came along, but now — well, it’s back to him doing the work alone again.
Already the low, simmering dread is creeping back into his gut.
The knowledge that very little is keeping everything from falling apart. He can try and strive and struggle. But the reality will never change. Life could easily become impossible. As it is, life is barely manageable.
Ekko is elbow-deep into the guts of a breather when Scar brings him rumors about – something. Scar’s been monitoring enforcer radio chatter because patrols have started delving into the sewers to root out pockets of resistance. And while it’s unlikely for them to go deep enough to find the Firelight Tree, it’s not impossible.
One of the patrols apparently didn’t come back. The enforcers sent out a squad of Noxians to investigate. And they didn’t come back either. A third squad went out and found the first two. What was left of them, at least.
“They’re terrified,” Scar tells him. “Something happened at Stillwater too. It’s related, but I don’t know how.”
He gets his answer the next day when Elie comes back to them.
She’d been carted off to Stillwater after a checkpoint enforcer found a scrap of blue fabric in her pocket.
“I almost didn’t come back,” Elie says when he seeks her out. “I was topside. The Hexgates were right there.”
Ekko nods. “You can still go. We can probably get the money together to pay your fare.”
“That’s exactly why I didn’t, you bastard,” Elie says, scowling at him. Then she scoffs. “And honestly, where would I go? Ionia?”
“I’m sure you could find a nice fish vastayan to shack up with.”
Elie wrinkles her nose. “I don’t even want to think about that. “No, I guess I’m stuck here. I have my shop to think about.”
“Bo’s been checking up on it while you were gone,” Ekko says.
Elie smiles. “He’s a good kid.” She walks over to her little dining table where one of Ekko’s shirts had been slung over the back of a chair. The sleeve is partially patched. She hadn’t finished by the time the enforcers arrested her.
Eventually, Ekko says, “I’ve thought about it too.”
Elie looks up at him. “My shop?”
“No.” Ekko rocks his weight on and off his heels. He breaks eye contact. “Leaving. I’ve thought about it before.”
When he looks back at Elie, her eyebrows have risen with surprise. Then she tilts her head and considers him. “I guess we’ve all thought about it at some point,” she says. “I wouldn’t have expected it from you though.”
Ekko shrugs. “I didn’t expect it from me either.”
Elie nods, an odd expression on her face. She walks back over to him. Regards him for a long moment. “It was Jinx,” she finally says.
That stops him short. He can’t hide the expression that crosses his face. The ugly everything jumbled inside his chest.
Whatever Elie sees, she jerks her hands up then back down in a quick, tight movement. Like she wanted to touch him but thought better of it. He wonders what she saw in his face. “I know what you think of her. But you should know.” She twists her hands together. “Jinx was the one who broke us out of Stillwater.”
“Oh.”
“And,” Elie says. “There was something else there.”
She doesn’t continue further than that. She’s stopped looking at him, her eyes fixed on some distant point, her face pale.
“Hey,” Ekko says. “Hey.” He reaches forward, and touches her arm. Elie flinches but lets him guide her to sit down by the table. She absently plucks at his partially mended shirt.
“Do you want something to eat?” Ekko asks. “I could — Kay probably has dinner ready. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”
Elie shakes her head. Then a little harder, as if to shake a thought out of her head. “I’m fine. I just — you know, I had a moment.”
“Yeah.”
“Something came to Stillwater,” Elie says. “It — ”
“It’s okay,” Ekko says. “You don’t have to — ”
Elie scowls at him. “No, you should know about it.”
He backs off. “Alright.”
Elie nods, short and tight. “It was like a nightmare,” she tells him. “It slaughtered the guards.” She takes a breath. “It tore apart everything it saw. I’ve never seen a Noxian afraid. Or run from a fight. And we hid but it — not all of us made it out.”
“Elie — ”
“Don’t,” she says, sharp. “And then it went deeper into the prison. We made it to the gondolas. And Sevika came running out, holding a kid. She told us to get the fuck out.” Elie looks at him. “She told us Jinx stayed behind to hold it off.”
She doesn’t tell him the rest, but Ekko can — he can fill in the gaps. He feels it washes over him, passing from his neck to his spine, down to his feet. He thinks, the night they danced, she wore blue eyeshadow and a white dress.
“Thanks for letting me know,” Ekko says. Then he leaves.
He’d thought about finding her. After he came back.
He doesn’t know what he would’ve said to her. Whether there was anything he could even say that would — connect.
She couldn’t be saved. She didn’t want to be saved. She did Silco’s dirty work for years. She didn’t care who she hurt. She pulled the pin on the grenade to kill them both. She killed Eve because her hair happened to be the same color as Vi’s. Once, she’d looked up at him on the bridge, and he saw that she was afraid.
He would’ve — he would’ve tried.
He does try.
He spends sleepless nights scrawling out Z-drive calculations. If he could find somewhere deep underground where there was no one to hurt. If he cranked the drive to its absolute limit. If he found a larger hex crystal. If he worked out a different set of runes. Maybe he could go back far enough. Three days. Four days. A week.
And then too much time passes. He reaches a point where turning back time far enough to undo her death would mean creating a singularity so potent, it would completely erase both Piltover and the undercity from existence.
He stares dry-eyed at the Z-drive on his workbench. At the gently rotating string of monkeys cheerfully crashing cymbals together, lit by a bright wavering point of arcane energy.
He goes to bed.
“We should make sure people stay away from the southern sewers,” Ekko says to Scar. “Whatever this is, it was deadly enough to wipe out a full Noxian regiment. It’s best that we don’t risk any — hey, are you listening?”
Scar is looking at him.
“You haven’t been sleeping.”
“I sleep every night,” Ekko says. And he does. He dreams about the weight of her head on his shoulder. About explosives stuffed with dyed powder.
“You haven’t been sleeping well, then.”
Ekko shrugs. “Can’t do anything about that.”
Scar places a hand on his shoulder. “Ekko.”
“I’m trying,” he tells him. “But there are some things out of my control.”
He’ll move on, eventually. The wound of Benzo’s death is a gnarled mass of scar tissue inside him, but it did heal over. One day, the thought of her won’t hurt like it does now. He’ll deal with it. He has work to do, anyway.
“I’m fine,” Ekko says. “Really.”
Scar nods slowly. They both know his hearing is sensitive enough to pick up on how Ekko’s heartbeat skips through the lie.
Ekko holds his gaze.
Eventually, Scar relents. “You said the southern sewers?”
“Yeah.” He hopes he doesn’t sound too relieved that Scar is letting the issue go.
“I’ll make sure to warn the others.”
One of the alarms by the western entrance trips. Ekko grabs his board and checks it out.
The tunnels look clear. They have false positives sometimes. A cat tripping a wire. One of the others not looking where they’re stepping.
Ekko hops off his board to reset the pressure plate. Maybe they’ve calibrated them to be too sensitive. He doesn’t really want to waste everyone’s time with false alarms. He mulls over what level of sensitivity wouldn’t trigger for a cat, but would for a yordle.
Then a cold shiver tingles down his spine. Some animal instinct.
He looks behind him. Freezes.
There’s a dark mass, barely discernible in the gloom of the sewer. It isn’t a human shape. It’s something large, hunched over. Like a monster out of a nightmare.
He doesn’t have his Z-drive with him.
Ekko thinks of what Elie told him. The reports on the enforcer frequencies. The Firelight Tree is only a few turns away from here. If this thing finds its way there — it’s unthinkable. No one would survive.
Ekko glances at his board, leaning against the wall. He needs to get it away from here. He can lead it away, deep into the sewers, far enough that it won’t ever come back here. He might not make it out alive, but if he can — if he can do that, that’s enough.
He draws up his courage, gets ready to grab his board.
A voice shouts, “It’s not what it looks like!”
Ekko freezes again.
A figure steps out from behind the monster with her hands raised. There’s static in his brain. Powder. Jinx. Powder. Alive. Dead. Alive. Alive. It rips through him, like a shock of cold fresh air. She’s alive.
It’s almost enough to himself. He barely keeps sight of the fact that this isn’t another Ekko’s Powder from another world. This is Jinx. His Jinx from his world. He tightens his grip on his bat. And Jinx has brought the monster to his doorstep.
“Why would you bring that here?” Ekko grits out.
The monster rumbles a growl.
Jinx pushes between them, her hands are still raised. Empty. Unarmed.
“It’s not what you think,” she says. She’s looking at him. Powder looked at him and placed her hand on his cheek. Ekko shakes the image out of his head.
“I don’t know what to think,” Ekko says.
“It’s Vander,” Jinx says.
She’s close. It’s messing with him.
“What?”
“It’s Vander,” Jinx repeats. She sweeps her hand back to the monster. “It’s Vander.” Her eyes are wide. He can’t stop seeing Powder. He can’t trust her.
“What about Vander?” Ekko says.
Jinx waves her hand again at the monster. “He’s Vander.”
Ekko finally gets it. “That’s Vander?”
“That’s Vander.”
Ekko blinks at her. She must have truly lost it. “I don’t — ”
“It’s him,” Jinx says. She takes another step towards him, into a shaft of light cutting through the gloom. “You have to believe me.”
She’s so close to him. He can’t stop staring at her. She looks exhausted. Her eyes are tinted with the sickly pink of Shimmer, almost luminescent. The skin of her cheek is thin, he can see blue veins.
“Vi didn’t — ” Jinx’s voice creaks a little. “Vi didn’t believe me.”
There’s a spreading bruise on her neck, shaped like a hand.
“C’mon, boy savior,” Jinx says, cracking a smile. “Isn’t this what you do? I just need some — ” her smile drops. Then she’s looking at him, and he’s looking at her. “Some help. That’s all.”
He told himself he would try, didn’t he?