Work Text:
Everything is blue
His pills, his hands, his jeans
And now I'm covered in the colors
Pulled apart at the seams
And it's blue
And it's blue
Everything is grey
His hair, his smoke, his dreams
And now he's so devoid of color
He don't know what it means
And he's blue
And he's blue
The rooftop was waiting.
Empty, weathered, waiting.
Still.
Ekko pulled himself over the last rung of the ladder, boots scuffing the concrete as he hauled himself up. The air here is sharp enough to slice through a memory, and he thinks it knows exactly what it's doing to him.
Testing. Always testing.
What are you doing here?
The rooftop was empty.
This space – this hollow, stripped thing – it used to breathe. Not with lungs but with laughter.
Powder had made it that way—Powder, not Jinx. Not the girl who had unraveled into chaos, consumed by grief and twisted into vengeance. Before grief reshaped her, before pain became a weapon instead of a wound.
Powder.
The name carried its own kind of gravity, pulling Ekko into memories that were sharp around the edges. He closed his eyes for a moment, and the space filled with ghosts. She had painted this rooftop in light and laughter, with streaks of color and flowers that sprouted from the cracks in another world. She had made this place alive. Not the Powder who unraveled, but the Powder who had carried her grief differently, tenderly. She hadn’t let it hollow her out.
Blue and silver and red and gold.
(This is how he remembers her.)
He opened his eyes, and the rooftop was alone.
Ekko stood in the silence of the rooftop, a place stripped to its bare bones. Gone were the flowers, the lights Powder had strung to dance with the twilight, the streaks of color she had painted over the gray. Time had swept its hand over everything, clearing it like an unfinished canvas. Ekko sinks to the ground, letting the weight of what-was pressed against his shoulders.
The view hadn’t changed, though.
In both worlds.
In both possibilities.
The same sky watches over both.
Piltover. Golden, untouchable, cruel in its beauty.
There.
The city above rises before him like a taunt dressed in gilded promises, every spire reaching for a sky that seems to bend toward its light. Hope shimmers in the metal and glass, and Ekko thinks that's the cruelest part – how hope stays just close enough to hurt, like a game where the rules keep changing.
He hates it sometimes, watching it gleam. Hates how it wears its beauty like armor, unblemished despite the blood that runs in rivers beneath its streets.
Piltover and Zaun.
Two halves of a broken heart, finally forced to acknowledge their shared pulse. War has made surgeons of them all, stitching together wounds they'd rather forget. No victory march, no triumph – just the quiet, painful work of healing what they let fester for too long.
Gold and shadow and steel and smoke.
(This is how the cities learn to breathe together.)
Ekko stared at the horizon where Piltover’s light met Zaun’s shadows. There was no denying it anymore—the way events in one city rippled into the other. The paper in his hand is soft now, worried thin by restless fingers. A blue rose blooms across its surface, drawn with shaking hands – imperfect, jagged, alive. Ekko's breath clouds in the cold air as he traces its outline. It has to be enough. Has to carry the weight of everything he can't say.
The rooftop waited.
A blue rose.
Wasn’t for this world’s Powder. It wasn’t even for Jinx—not really. It was for something deeper, something harder to name. An apology. A confession. A fragment of hope.
In another world, another timeline, he had given Powder a locket—a delicate thing, impossibly small. He’d pressed it into her hand and watched her face light up, a cautious, tentative joy spreading across her features. Like she didn’t quite believe she could hold something so beautiful.
For the girl who knew how to hold beauty without breaking it, in another time, another chance.
Fragile, precious, possible. (This is how he remembers her.)
He remembered that look, the way her eyes—unguarded, open—reflected the possibility of something better. That Powder had been extraordinary, not because the world had spared her pain, but because she had refused to become it.
The blue rose trembles in the wind, and Ekko lets his fingers memorize its edges. Here, now, it's an offering to Jinx, not just for the chaos she wears like a second skin. It's also for the echo of Powder that lives in her bones, for his own failures folded into paper, for all the times he chose walking away over staying to fight.
Even if she burns with it, even if she laughs – it doesn't matter.
(He had to give her something.)
Ekko flicked the lighter open, the metallic click breaking the rooftop’s stillness. The flame leapt to life, small and fragile, yet consuming. He brought it to the edge of the paper, hesitating for a fraction of a second longer than he intended. The blue ink began to distort and bleed as the fire took hold, curling the edges into smoke.
It's not paper burning in his hands. Not really.
It was her.
All of her.
Powder, small and trembling beneath the weight of grief so vast it had bent her in half. He’d seen her shatter, her fragility so stark it hurt to look at. And instead of holding her together, instead of gathering her broken pieces, he (coward, friend, failure) had turned away. Chosen anger because it filled the spaces where guilt threatened to bloom.
Blue and ash and ember and smoke. (This is how he loses her again.)
He grieved for Powder—the girl who had once made the world brighter, who had strung lights across the dark places and painted joy into the cracks. The Powder who was gone, irrevocably lost. And he grieved for the Powder he walked away from, the girl he had given up on, the one he could have saved if only he’d been brave enough to try.
If only he’d stayed.
If only staying hadn't felt like drowning.
Jinx.
Chaos wrapped in lightning, fire given form. He'd tried to save her too – not soon enough, not right enough, but with time stolen from better futures. In one fractured moment, one splintered possibility, he'd reached her. Seen past the chaos to the friend beneath.
His Powder, breathing through the breaks.
Never enough. Never quite right. Never lasting. (Maybe, this is how the story always ends.)
But it was never enough. Not in this world, not in the others. Not in any of the infinite possibilities. He had lost her again, and again, and again. Jinx was always just out of reach, slipping through his fingers like smoke. A cycle of grief and failure that replayed endlessly, each time hollowing him out a little more.
The grief sits heavy now, layers deep and ocean-vast, pressing against his ribs until breathing feels like work. Powder-Jinx-Friend-Ghost-Almost lover – the names blur together, meaningless in firelight. The rose burns quick and clean, ink bleeding into ash that rises like memories set free. His chest aches, full of words that taste like rust and regret.
His voice cracked as he whispered into the emptiness, “Old friend... I hope you’re happy. Wherever you are.”
The words fall empty, hollow things that can't begin to hold his hurt. But they're all he has left, these paper-thin offerings to a girl who used to paint with starlight. He stands long after the wind claims the ashes, staring at empty air like it might finally offer answers.
It doesn't.
It never does.
(This is how he learns it hurts to let go.).
The bomb. Metal and memory, painted smiles, borrowed time.
His fingers brushed against the pocket of his jacket, finding the hard, familiar shape of the monkey bomb. He pulled it out slowly, its painted grin catching the dim light. Too bright. Too loud. Too much like her. The weight of it in his hand felt unbearable, heavier than it should have been, like it carried all the years he’d spent trying to make sense of what had happened.
This is Jinx's legacy, written in gunpowder and paint. But it's Powder's too, whispering of a time when creation came before destruction, when her hands built wonders instead of weapons. Before the Undercity taught her how to break things.
Cold steel, warm paint, hollow weight. (This is how he holds their history together).
He turned the bomb over in his hands, his thumb tracing its edges. His chest tightened as he thought about all the times he’d wished he could go back, all the times he’d dreamed of finding the right words, the right actions to save her. But the past was merciless. It never gave anything back.
And then, for a short while, he’d had time on his side—four seconds that felt infinite and fleeting all at once. He'd used it well, those borrowed breaths. Saved her when grief had turned her weapon inward, when chaos threatened to claim its maker. He'd pulled her back from that edge, back to herself, back to him.
Precious, fleeting, possible. (This is how he saved her.)
They'd fought side by side after, shoulder to shoulder against a future neither believed in. Not enemies but allies – Powder and Jinx, two names for one heart beating in time with his. For those golden moments, they'd been whole again.
But time had to move forward again, relentless and unkind. He’d saved her, only to lose her again. To the war. To the cracks in the world. To the impossibility of hope.
His chest ached as he thought of her, their last dance in the Bridge of Progress burned into his memory. Seconds stretching like rubber, snapping back. Again. Again. Again. Again.
(This is how he learns to dance with her. Always a dance.)
Blue eyes wild in the dark, bullet paths he memorized like bitter poetry. He weaves through her chaos – one step left, duck, roll, time fractured and rewound until his muscles sing with remembered pain. His weapon connects (finally, finally) and for a heartbeat, they freeze. Her eyes meet his, blue bleeding into gold, and he sees it there: recognition. The weight of shared history pressing against their throats.
Then she smiles (Powder's smile, Jinx's eyes) and the world erupts in blue fire.
(This is how they say goodbye.)
He remembers, the bridge groaning beneath them like a dying thing.
Now he stands on this empty rooftop, the memory of Vi's broken howl echoing in his chest. Vi, who fought through fire to reach her sister, now held upright only by Caitlyn's steady hands. He didn't need to see the body. Didn't need confirmation.
Her last look haunts him still – that silent question in electric blue eyes. He had no answer then, watching her slip through his fingers like smoke. He has none now, standing in the aftermath of her final chaos.
He could still hear her voice, raw and uncertain. “What now, Ekko?”
He hadn’t had an answer then. He still didn’t.
Carefully, almost as if it might shatter, he set the bomb down on the rooftop. Its grin stared back at him, too bold and too familiar. He let his hand linger on it for a moment, the weight of it pressing down like all the seconds he could no longer take back. He had saved this world, but he hadn’t saved her—not truly. And he never would.
Still, the wanting aches. The need to see her one last time, caught in that moment between names – not Jinx, not Powder, just a girl with purple eyes looking at him like he could anchor her to shore.
Past and gone and lost and yearning.
Time, for all its power, could only give him a fleeting grasp at what could have been.
His hand fell away from the bomb, fingers brushing the strap of the bag at his feet. The sound of spray cans clattering against each other broke the silence, sharp and jarring. He reached down, pulling one out with trembling hands. The first hiss of blue startled him, cutting through the heavy stillness like a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.
The paint struck the concrete, the line uneven, hesitant.
But as he moved, the colors began to flow. Blue. Red. Green. They bled together, vivid streaks of life cutting through the endless gray. It wasn’t precise. It wasn’t beautiful. But it was something—something he could leave behind.
In the center of it all, he painted the blue rose. Its petals were jagged, its shape imperfect, but it didn’t matter. It was his, just as much as it was hers.
Ekko stepped back, his breath shallow as he turned to the skyline. Piltover stretches golden before him, its spires still reaching for stars that seem almost close enough to touch. The city feels different tonight – not quite home, but no longer a taunt dressed in gilt and glory. Just another place where broken things might learn to heal.
The rooftop wasn’t alive in the way it once had been. There were no flowers, no lights strung to dance with the twilight. But it wasn’t empty anymore, either. The colors behind him whispered of something new—or maybe something old, something broken but still worth trying to mend.
But that was why he chose it.
Ekko stayed there, the wind cold against his face, carrying the faint scent of paint and ashes. He stayed until the weight in his chest began to shift, just slightly, like the first breath after surfacing from deep water. The rooftop wasn’t the same, couldn’t be the same.
And maybe that was the point.
The rooftop breathes different now
(and maybe, this is how some stories begin again).