Work Text:
Watching her sister fall to her death was a special kind of hell for Violet. All the anger she might have held towards Powder, and any and all hatred she felt for Jinx dissipated at light speed the moment her sister slipped through her fingers all over again.
If she hadn’t frozen up, if she had just listened to her sister, if she had just taken a second to cool her head instead of getting lost in her memories. She’s always stuck. Her mind brought her back to her Stillwater cell, clawing at the bars trying to reach her sister. She could let gravity take its course this very moment and they’d be together again. Yet she’s ice. Her mind is numb. Pain, fear, anger, sadness, hate- did any of it matter? Her sister was dying. Her father was dying again. And it was all her fault.
When the explosion went off, she wasn’t sure if she was watching a memory or if hell had resumed once more.
Preferably, Ekko would’ve liked to take a minute or two to just lie down and catch his breath after saving the city. Or the universe. The city was a subset of the universe anyways so he’d just go with the latter.
The explosion had him scrambling for his hoverboard.
Ekko swerved into the tower and was met with the sight of Vi shaking and in tears over a shaky and half-broken ledge, hand outstretched and unmoving towards the rubble below. He doesn’t remember what he said to her but it probably wouldn’t have made a difference anyways. She wasn’t hearing him. So he propped Vi’s arms over his shoulder, forcing her to hold on as he boarded them down in search of Jinx.
Nausea threatened to bring bile up his throat. He had no time to lose. No do-overs.
When he had initially seen the right side vent, he brushed it off as an impossible escape route. He was working off the assumption that Jinx was completely unarmed as she fell and had nothing to accelerate her enough to change her trajectory as fast as she would have needed. It was physically impossible for a human-
But a shimmer-mutant might have been able to pull it off. Especially Jinx.
Vi sobs when she sees Jinx’s body limply slouched over a broken vent blade. Ekko pushes away the image of his oldest friend motionless and bloodied on the foot of the Pilt bridge, tipping his hoverboard as forward as he could go without flipping him and Vi over.
“Hey - wake up!” Ekko called, grounded by the feeling of Vi’s trembling fingers crushing his shoulders.
When Jinx blearily pushes herself off the blade, she doesn’t seem to realise that she’s made herself victim to inertia. The fan begins to roll down and her body slips off the blade. The hoverboard wobbles dangerously as they surge forward, and when they catch Jinx all three of them are sent barrelling across the vent tunnel floor.
“Fuck,” Ekko hisses when his arm is immediately blanketed with searing pain. His heavy breathing drowns out the others’ pained groans in his ears, the three of them an odd harmony of physical exertion and injury. Once all of them had had their moment of writhing pathetically, Jinx begins to snicker from where she laid on the metal floor.
Vi heaves out a deep sigh as she crawls over towards her sister, cradling her face in her palm gently. “Why’d you let go?”
Ekko shoots up in panic at the question.
Jinx glances between the two of them. “I had a plan,” she says but the downturn of her lips betrayed her, “and I don’t build things in halves.”
Ekko clutches at his broken arm while holding Jinx’s hinting gaze. He huffs. Better one broken bone than two hundred and six. Or, well - six hundred and eighteen, since he and Vi nearly bit the dust trying to save her concussed ass.
“So…” Jinx starts, her voice taking its usual out-of-place cheerful lilt. “Was it just me or was the Man of Progress hitching a ride on an alien space rocket?”
“Nah, that was Viktor. The other hextech dude,” at Jinx’s blank look, Ekko tries, “... the one that was in the magic ball?”
“Fortune cookie?!”
Ekko looks confusedly at Vi who gives him a shrug, still gazing thoughtfully at her sister. “Met him in the sumps. Looked more…” Vi squints, fingers dancing in the air as she searched for the appropriate descriptor, “princess-y?”
“Asshole put his magic-cosmo-wombo fingers in my head and called me Powder. I think he deserves to die ugly since he was plain mean to me.” Jinx all but sticks her tongue out petulantly.
Ekko sighed. “Jayce had a picture of them in his lab. It’s always the handsome men…”
“Pretty boys aside,” Vi glances up to the hexgate’s rooftop, “what just happened and how are we not dead?”
“Uhm…” Ekko folds his arms and hums in thought for a moment. “I don’t know actually. I threw the z-drive at him and hoped for the best I guess?”
“You guess?” Vi and Jinx scowl simultaneously.
Jinx grabs Ekko by his collar and shakes him. “I can’t believe you did the boss fight without me! If I take a nap and wake up having to do all this again, I will re-invent time travel just to beat the shit out of you. How does eternity sound?”
Ekko’s hearty laugh riled her up even more.
As they walk down the tower, Vi retells the recent tale of how she electrocuted Ambessa Medarda. The wide-eyed looks and excited egging she got from Ekko and her sister filled Vi with a warmth she thought long gone. The duo’s chittering soon melted into easy banter which left Vi with a bittersweet taste in her mouth.
They’d grown up.
Their celebratory mood turns sullen as they make their way down to where everyone was counting their dead and tending to the wounded. Ekko breaks away from their trio, setting off to look for Scar ('Bat-ears', Vi’s memory supplies). Vi tries to gloss her eyes over the bloodshed and focus on identifying the survivors, but she gets caught up looking at familiar faces of people she had come to know during her time topside.
It’s strikingly obvious when Sevika spots Jinx across the rubble and bodies. The bulky woman drops the scrawny cigarette she had been smoking and smothers the fire with her boot before trudging forward, a mild but noticeable limp in her gait. Vi instinctively makes a move to tuck her sister behind her, but Jinx looks on with a sneer on her lips. “Geez lady, you’re still kicking-?”
Jinx tenses in surprise when Sevika wordlessly pulls her into a tight half embrace, her flesh arm wrapped across her shoulder, shaking palms grasping at the back of her head that betray the seeming insincerity of the hug. Not more than a moment later, Sevika pulls away and studies Jinx’s face, her own expression stoic.
“Still got all your insides?”
Jinx grins but the question tugs at the suppressed darkness bubbling in her core. “My kidneys are definitely bruised. Got anything for that? Other than bum cigarettes off the floor, of course.”
Sevika huffs and rolls her eyes at Jinx. “The Laners’ve got vodka in the medi-tents. But we all know by now that drinking gets you too sober. And gives you ideas.”
“That’s fine. I think the Noxians probably have some of that expensive wine in their ships. Who brings fancy liquor to a gun fight? Noxians, I’d bet my lucky bullet.”
“What did I just say about having ideas?”
Vi glances between the two. What…was this?
Sevika twitches her chin towards one of the tents to the left. Vi found it unsettlingly uncharacteristic that Jinx falls into step beside Sevika without quip or cheek. Sevika sends a glare Vi’s way but she’s starting to think that that just means mild friendliness by Sevika’s standards.
“And the kid?”
Jinx freezes in her tracks. Sevika gives her a moment before she glances down at Jinx’s fingers, seeing something in the scratched polish and scarred cuticles that Vi didn’t understand. Sevika does not meet Jinx’s eyes again, but she puts her metal arm around Jinx and pulls her along to continue their walk, Jinx’s shoulder tucked flush beneath Sevika’s.
Hours later, Sevika would lead the Zaunites back home, map out plans for stability and crush away outliers singing promises of power. Vi would stay by Caitlyn’s side, withdrawn into a deep silence, her earlier post-fight cheer fleeting.
Days later, Jinx would lead Sevika down to the sumps where a ruined utopia lies and a grave of stones and pebbles holds up a child’s bowl hat. No one could be sure of what was said in those moments and no one could even begin to speculate where the gold pendant that Sevika would come to chain to her belt came from. It didn’t take much imagination to think of the pendant as a prosthetic finger, but why anyone, least of all Sevika, would carry one around was a mystery.
In the coming weeks from then, Vi would hum her mother’s tune at the fireplace and think of all the possibilities that the future could hold for her. The word 'home' still hurt like a missing limb, but the pain wasn’t as paralysing as she had been so used to it being, now that she had someone to keep her present. Caitlyn would flip though Jayce and Viktor’s hexgate blueprints, her heart sore from the loss of her brother, her friend and her mother and yet be filled with wonder of the woman she fell in love with. She would also hold begrudging awe of a certain unsquashable blue cockroach. Ekko would watch in silence as firelights dispersed across the darkness of his home, lighting the new Zaun with an almost-magical glow. Then he would return to his friends and begin their rounds to check in on whoever needed help around the Lanes. Sevika would take her seat on the council; for a second, she would trace the monkey skull engraved onto her chest plate and she would briefly wonder if Jinx held any resentment that Sevika sat where the girl’s father should have.
But floating away on a pristine airship, all a blue-haired woman can think about is walking away and finally letting everyone move forward - including herself. Whoever she may be.