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Vi’s piltie girlfriend goes to visit Jinx in her cell.
When she approaches the bars, she clears her throat, says “Hello,” with her jaw clenched like she's clawing out the word with her fingernails. If they were in the undercity, Jinx’s head would be smashed against the wall already, brains splattered over the grey concrete. There’s no need for rich, empty platitudes down there. No petty politics or mind manipulation between the common man. Only debts paid with blood.
Jinx says nothing in reply. Feels nothing.
Caitlyn— Jinx remembers, as if she could ever truly forget— shoves a tray of food under the bars with a loud, metal screech. “Are you not going to eat?”
Blood drops from Jinx’s hand onto the cold, hard floor of the cell. She doesn’t feel it, only half-registering that she is picking at her nails at all — and feels the ghost of a faraway dream curl large, calloused fingers around hers, a deep voice and the smell of ale and pine; Stop that, Powder. It’ll scar, Powder. don’t hurt yourself, Powder. Jinx looks at the wall carved with tally marks and shitty drawings and tries not to think.
She had almost forgotten about Caitlyn until she hears a loud sigh. “Vi— thinks you’ve changed.”
Of course she does. If Jinx had the energy, she’d laugh.
The enforcers had taken down her hair from her long braids, and not at all gently. They had tugged and twisted as harshly as they could get away with, trying to elicit some sort of reaction from the criminal mastermind, the resistance symbol of Zaun, the crazy girl who had blown up their friends with a laugh and splash of neon. She didn’t give them one and welcomed the sharp pain of hair follicles ripped from scalp. After all, it was the least she deserved.
She looks through the curtain of icy blue at Caitlyn. “She can’t accept what you and I both know. People don’t change,” She pauses, breathes, “There are no happy endings.”
She should feel cold. The enforcers had taken her shoes, her gloves, for no real reason other than to see her miserable. Nothing new there. But what they didn’t know was that she had nothing left to give, not even misery, not even pain.
“Is that all you have to say for yourself?” Caitlyn asks. Jinx doesn’t know her that well, thank Gods, but she can tell that she’s completely fucking furious. Jinx almost respects it. She should be furious.
Jinx goads her on. “If you’re here to kill me, you’re stupider than you look. It would be worse for me if you just left me here to die.” Please don’t leave me here. Please don’t leave me here alone. Violet I need you please—
Caitlyn ignores her. “There won’t be a trial. The people here do not fucking like you,” including you, Jinx thinks, “You have caused—“ she pauses, draws in a deep breath and exhales it slowly out her mouth, “so much pain.”
The thing is, Jinx knows how this feels. A physical pain in your chest and stomach, like a hot iron resting on your torso. If their positions were changed, Jinx would’ve killed her months ago.
But— she can use this to her advantage. To end the cycle once and for all.
And the stupid girl sets it all up perfectly. “I’m giving you one chance to account for your actions. Why won’t you admit what you’ve done?”
Jinx takes a deep breath. “Okay. I admit I killed your useless piltie mother. To be honest, I did the world a fucking favor. Does that make you feel any better, Cait?”
Like clockwork, and before Jinx can even register it, her cell is unlocked and Caitlyn has her shoved against the damp wall, pistol positioned inches away from her forehead. Her eyes are clouded with a desperate blazing anger and for a second, just one, Jinx can understand why her sister is so sweet on her. Vi has always been drawn to survival, to life, and this girl is brimming with it.
“Shut the fuck up,” Caitlyn breathes hotly. Jinx, because she’s Jinx, doesn’t listen.
She doesn’t physically push back, but talks loudly enough for Caitlyn to falter, if only slightly, “Or what? You and I both know you’re too chicken-shit to actually pull the trigger. You had the shot that night. You could’ve stopped me. You could’ve stopped all of this.”
A knee is shoved into Jinx’s stomach, sharply and with so much force that she falls to her knees. It reminds her of how enforcers would shove pistols in-between zaunites’ ribs when they searched them, and Jinx feels suddenly, viciously sick for an entirely different reason.
Caitlyn’s pistol is positioned right between her eyes. Jinx clutches her stomach, glances up at her on instinct. Caitlyn looks down with so much emotion on her face that the two of them must look like foils of each other, a pair of warped twins— one blue-haired-girl with dead, vacant eyes, one with so much life in them that it’s almost scarier than the former.
Jinx sighs. Gives up.
She had given up a long, long time ago. Maybe before she even knew she had surrendered she had already been desperately waving the white flag. Maybe that’s why Silco has been so skeptical of her. Maybe that’s why Vi had left. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
She leans forward into the barrel of the pistol. It’s steel-cold when it indents her skin, but she only feels it very distantly, as if she’s watching it happen to someone else— or as if someone else is controlling her movements. She is possessed, haunted. Gods know she has enough bodies eager to haunt her. Claggor. Mylo. Vander. Silco. Ekko’s friends. Cassandra Kiramman and co.
Powder. Isha.
Jinx looks up at Caitlyn with the pistol digging into her forehead and says, with an awful, wretched voice, “Do it. Please.”
There’s a moment, a freeing, terrifying, devastating moment where Jinx thinks that Caitlyn will actually do it. She’s so fucking angry, Jinx can tell, so fucking angry at Jinx and herself and everything else— that Jinx thinks there’s no way she will be able to shrug it all off and walk away. It’s not possible.
If she wavers because of Vi, Jinx thinks, then I can tell her that she will never have to know. She can tell Vi that they found me like this, that an angry, vengeful enforcer must’ve gotten a hold of a key somehow, and Caitlyn and Vi can run off into the sunset together.
But then, there’s a gasp, and a shock that runs through Caitlyn’s face, morphing her bird-like features one by one. And then horror. Devastation. Sorrow.
Sympathy.
The first thing Jinx can actually feel that night is surprise, and an overall confusion and what the fuck? which she doesn’t get to voice before there are long, warm arms enveloping her shoulders.
“What are you—?” Jinx’s eyes almost pop out of her head. She’s— Caitlyn is hugging her. The piltie enforcer whose mother Jinx had killed, murdered, is kneeling down in a damp, dark prison cell and is actually holding her.
And it’s fucking nice. It’s warm and comforting and something that Jinx has missed so badly for years and years, and all she can think is I don’t deserve this, and a little maniacally, even when I beg, I just can't seem to die. And then she burst into tears.
Jinx thinks of Isha, of her warm big eyes and unrelenting faith, a handshake and a rematch and a flash of clear bright blue in cloudy red, and then the nothing that followed. She thinks about her own desperation to keep Isha safe, of the selfishness that had partly created that urge— please don’t let me be a Jinx, not anymore— and then the realisation that she always would be. There is no good version of me.
Thin shoulders are shaking against hers, sobs muffled into skin, and Jinx realises that Caitlyn is crying too. They’re united in their hate, their anger, at themselves and each other. She tries to compartmentalise the feeling with another ache, but cant— this is something completely uncharted and unfamiliar; holding someone who she has hurt and who has hurt her, and having them hold her back.
Jinx holds on, and doesn’t let go.
𓇢𓆸
So Achilles, show deference to the gods
and pity for myself, remembering
your own father. Of the two old men, I’m more pitiful, because I have endured
what no living mortal on this earth has borne—
I’ve lifted up to my own lips and kissed
the hands of the man who killed my son.
- Homer, The Iliad