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Of course, it would be impossible for Jinx to remember the first time he held her. Felicia had given birth at least a month early, and little Powder had come into the world eerily quiet and still. The sister had been screaming herself hoarse in the other room while Vander tried desperately and without success to reassure her that her mother would be perfectly fine, which left Silco to actually hold the damn thing and make sure it was still breathing when Felicia passed out. The infant was alive, of course, but doing a damn good impression of a corpse. He had gingerly cradled the tiny thing in his arms for the next several hours as Felicia slept, two fingers resting gently on its chest to monitor the delicate new lungs and soft heartbeat.
He’s the only one still technically living to recall that day, but he doesn’t consider the memory his; it’s a reminiscence he inherited from a dead man. That was the first and last time he interacted with Powder in any capacity. He’d never felt comfortable around children, and had declined any and all offers to meet the little girl again, the same as he had with the firstborn. His resolute distance had irritated the others, but Felicia had understood well enough not to press. She had admitted to the same anxiety years ago, though it had surely faded by the second child. He had hardly even seen the girl in the years that followed: she was there in the corner of meetings, sometimes, the children allowed to stay as long as Vi kept her little sister and Benzo’s foundling busy, and later– after everything– spotted occasionally in the Lanes, categorized vaguely in his mind as one of Vander’s lot, but he had no reason to engage her.
If Silco had his way, he would label that day in the alley as the first time he held his daughter, her entire body heaving with sobs, with rain, tears, and snot soaking through his shirt as his people stood above them and waited for him to use the knife.
…
He knows she sees things. He had assumed, for a while, that she was just talking to herself– normal enough, especially for a young child– but shortly after she establishes herself in her little workshop a year after he took her in (and after proving to him that she could use the space safely) he walks in and hears her immersed in an argument that quickly evolves into a screaming match with thin air. He pauses just inside the doorway and waits for a break in her speech, then walks closer, taking care to make his footsteps audible in contrast to his usual silent approach. Sure enough, she hears and scrambles to her feet to greet him with a wide grin and a debrief on her latest creation. It explodes beneath them with a bang that doesn't quite mask the way she sends an irritated glare and a whispered “Shut up, shut up, shut up–” to the empty space beside her. The bomb is perfect, he tells her, and her smile turns genuine as she launches into an explanation of the mechanisms within.
The dead man in Silco’s head stirs, and pushes forth a distant memory: three barely-teenagers, a regular meetup that would later become a highly organized political movement for Zaunite independence but was currently an excuse to get high off their asses and dodge any and all responsibility for a few hours every week, Felicia showing up late with a black eye and explaining cagily that sometimes her mother got confused, heard and saw things that Felicia didn’t, became agitated and accused her of lying, and only occasionally lost her temper, so it was fine, really, and no, there was no one Vander needed to rough up in vengeance.
(And something in both of them had rejected that, but Silco’s parents had hit him for far worse reasons, and Vander’s were gone by then, so what would they know, really?)
Silco pushes this back. The knowledge is not his, and it doesn’t help anyway. Even if it was the same illness, there’s hardly a cure.
Moreover, when he frames it that way, he hates the idea. Jinx isn’t sick like Felicia’s mother was sick. Whatever haunts her, she is fully capable of warding it off. She manages to keep her ghosts at bay; he won’t punish her by questioning her sanity.
Then there’s the forgetting– the way she does things, odd, out-of-character things that she later insists didn’t happen, weren’t her. She doesn't remember it, or, at least, she says she doesn’t, and he never wants to doubt her. Once, when she's almost fourteen, she climbs down into his office carefully instead of her usual freefall, quietly curling up on the ground by his chair before crawling under the desk, hidden from the world in a space she’ll soon outgrow. He doesn’t acknowledge it, but lets her grip his pant leg in a tight fist and stay there through the afternoon. He brings dinner to her room that night, and she’s back to normal. When he asks about the incident, she blinks and tells him she hadn’t done anything of the sort.
He presses; she can’t tell him anything she’s done that day. At this point, she becomes frustrated and turns on him, yelling questions, asking why she can’t remember. He doesn’t have anything to offer her, no answers and no guidance, but he grips her hand when she tries to hit herself on the head and holds it away, stopping her from hurting herself, and she sinks into his chest, still screaming but no longer intelligible. It’s so different to the silence she greeted him with earlier in the day that he considers the idea that it really wasn’t her before. That someone else simply took her form, borrowed her skin for a time.
Perhaps her body is haunted as well as her mind.
It isn’t long before he accepts this theory. Jinx is loud, brash, bold, distracting, and fills a room with her presence; the other person that lives in her is quiet, small, and unobtrusive. It doesn’t quite fit. He can tell, sometimes, that the girl who leans against him and lets him speak without a single interruption is not his daughter, or, at least, not the one he knows. Still, he sits by the girl’s bedside until she falls asleep the way Jinx never asks him to, gives her the reassurance and open affection Jinx doesn’t need. He can’t bring himself to reject her, even when she isn’t truly herself. Despite what he hears in whispers from the people he sends out on missions with her– besides Sevika, who has never been afraid enough of him to whisper– Jinx isn’t crazy, and she isn’t sick. There’s nothing wrong with her. It’s the echo of who she was, before everything, that makes her weak like this. Powder, who has carved out a space for herself in Jinx’s psyche and refuses to wither away. Being stalked by a spirit doesn’t reflect poorly on her. It’s how she responds that matters. And the way Jinx responds is unparalleled, faultless. She learns to live with the dying girl in her head.
…
And it takes so little time before he’s thinking of her that way: my child, my daughter, my perfect, perfect little girl . The shameful truth is that he took her in for far more personal reasons than practical, and hadn’t even considered her use until Sevika questioned him on it. He’d been able to form a response that sounded more thought through than it really was– something about seeing if she was half as capable as her older sister– then, later, when she’d explained her culpability in the explosion, he’d pointed to that as proof of her worth. A living weapon, if an uncontrollable one. But he doesn’t fuss about control. He can trust her to govern herself. She always does what’s best, what’s right, in the end.
She attaches herself to him so readily, without a hint of fear or hesitation. At first he put it down to ignorance, but a thorough explanation of who he was and his own part in Vander and the children’s deaths hadn’t phased her. Even the first night, she was demanding conversation, contact, climbing into his bed to curl under his arm after a nightmare predictably disturbed her rest.
Silco has always hated being touched. Well, maybe not always, but for a long enough time that it feels that way. He’s never been a strong man, and was manhandled often enough as a youth to develop a real distaste for it, even without the oft-attached ill intent. Anyone he’s ever allowed close to him in any capacity has known and respected it; he doesn’t think Sevika’s ever touched him if not to save his life. No one he trusts touches him without permission, and he doesn't touch them if he can help it.
Jinx doesn’t even bother with asking. She has always taken exactly what she wants from him, having seemingly never even considered that he wouldn’t deign to grant her something as simple as physical affection, which, he can assume, was never in short supply in Vander’s household. And he obliges, pushing down the discomfort that shoots up his spine when she wraps herself around him. It helps that she’s small. It helps more that he knows this is what she needs, and the deep satisfaction of giving her what she needs, being what she needs, easily overpowers that base aversion.
He doesn’t initiate anything, but does his level best to return her gestures. So she comes into his room in the dark to request comfort, night after night, and again and again he acquiesces, not only allowing her close but wrapping his arms around her in turn, lowering his head until hers is under his chin and he can smell adrenaline sweat, smoke, grease, and whatever chemical compounds she’s using in her bombs these days. Given enough time, any scent can become a source of comfort.
…
She’s eighteen when he puts name to something that he’s known for some time: Jinx has Vander’s temper.
It’s far from the only thing she inherited from the man; despite the lack of biological relation, he can see Vander in her eyes, her mannerisms, the way she tilts her head to the side like a begging dog when she wants something. And it’s not like she couldn’t have gotten anger from anywhere– anyone– else. Her sister, the two boys, her own experience with life in the undercity, even more likely Silco himself.
But it’s not their anger. It’s one he knows more intimately.
Silco lives with a low simmer of rage, and makes no attempt to hide it. He’s well aware that it makes him markedly unpleasant to be around, which doesn’t bother him. He doesn’t need people to like him. He just needs their respect. He doesn’t hide his seething resentment for topside, the enforcer pigs on his streets, or the incompetents he’s forced to work with– which means he doesn’t bottle anything up, which means he rarely raises his voice and never loses control. Silco is hot to the touch with anger, yes, but he hardly ever reaches a boil.
Vander was very different. He always came across as affable, good-natured, kind, not filled to the brim with roiling fury. Appearances can be deceiving like that. He was so calm, cool, unruffled, right up until–
Until he was yelling out of genuine anger, for the first time since Silco had met him, and they were around seventeen and stupid and Silco hadn’t realized their debate had become more personal than theoretical until Vander had shoved him and started shouting. Until he was muttering apologies to a twenty-something Silco who was nursing a black eye and telling him to shut up, that throwing a decent punch didn’t mean he’d won the argument, that “Sooner or later, Vander, you’ll have to stop solving all your problems with your fists.” Until he was unyielding hands that held fast and choked and pushed down down down down down–
Jinx’s anger is the same. And Silco has always known better than to tell himself it’s alright, she won’t hurt me when she flies into a violent rage, but it’s not until she’s eighteen that he realizes that knowledge comes from experience, from the deep water where he learned the hard lesson that you can never truly be sure what someone is capable of.
She’s eighteen when she grabs him by the throat. Well, that’s not entirely fair; it sounds unwarranted when he puts it like that. He understands why she’s outraged. They aren’t meant to lie to each other– he certainly didn’t intend to. Not for so long, at least. He really didn’t know the sister was alive, and he really wishes he could afford to kill the sheriff, whether for keeping it from him until now or for allowing her survival in the first place. Either. Both. It doesn’t matter to him. What matters is that now Jinx has been led to believe that he’s intentionally misinformed her all these years, and now she’s unstable and furious with him, and now she’s above him with the syringe shining in her clenched fist and her other hand gripping his neck. Her eyes look so much like Vander’s in that moment that it hurts, even before she plunges the needle into his cheek.
He pleads, though not in so many words, for her to believe him, to trust him. There’s only us. He’s not sure if it works. When she leaves, all the air exits his lungs in a rush of relief, and he leans forward into the space that, he observes on an inhale, still smells like Jinx’s filthy hair. He makes a mental note to wash her hair again soon, if she lets him. (Eighteen years old, and she hardly ever bathes without first being prompted by him or– less gently– by Sevika, and then he still has to do the hard part…)
And this is what it comes to, really. The girl threatens him, physically hurts him, scares him half to death, and he thinks about washing her hair. He allows her to take such liberties. Silco knows he lets Jinx get away with things he’d have anyone else killed for. It’s only natural– anyone else isn’t his daughter; he’s not ashamed in the slightest of the double standard. But it occurs to him, now, something slightly more concerning. He’d let her do anything to him, he thinks. Anything at all.
…
These days he misses her childhood nightmares, as well as every other horrible thing that’s driven her into his arms. From the moment she knows her sister is out there, Jinx is a ghost in his home: presence palpable but impossible to pin down. He doesn’t see her for days, and when he does, she’s distant. It’s not that she’s still angry with him for the deception. It’s worse than that. Jinx is chasing Violet’s tail, and when she catches it, someone is in for a rude awakening.
Jinx, most likely, because there is quite simply no way in hell Vi will really, truly welcome her little sister back into her life with open arms, changed as she is– Silco knows the type, knows how this story ends, and maybe it’s what’s best for Jinx, but he doesn’t want to see her go through that rejection again. Silco, quite possibly, because it is becoming more and more evident that he is no longer enough for her. He is no longer, in her eyes, what she needs. She’ll leave him behind if he doesn’t fight it.
This idea ignites a kind of desperation in him reserved for causes few and far between. Free Zaun. Kill Vander. Keep Jinx. It consumes him. He’s already gone after Vi once– and would’ve been able to take her out, he’s sure of it, if not for the enforcer– but now that Jinx has been made aware of her presence, that’s no longer an option. He needs another way. He needs Jinx to abandon her hunt for Vi of her own free will.
Certain things have gone unsaid between Silco and Jinx in the nearly eight years they’ve kept each other close. They may not be spoken aloud, but they aren’t secrets; they linger in the air thick and tangible as the Grey once was, in childhood memories he no longer considers his own.
Jinx never says I know you killed Vander. She never says I forgive you for that, if you forgive me the same. She never says I love you– neither of them do. It feels overwhelming and entirely unnecessary all at once. She doesn’t call him her father. He, in turn, doesn’t call her his daughter out loud.
She never told him she was tracking her sister. Nonetheless, when he hears where Vi and the enforcer– Kiramman– are headed, he knows he’ll find Jinx at the bridge. He isn’t prepared for the state he finds her in.
The next hour is the least coherent his mind has been in years. He doesn’t think about how Jinx was injured, what his next steps should be towards locating and punishing the culprits, the imminent threat of topside’s militarization, or the ramifications of the sheriff’s apparent demise. All he can think, until the moment Singed stops him from thinking anything at all, is that she can’t die. The thought of continuing without her fills him with paralyzing fear. It doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t feel possible . Jinx is more than human; she’s become a fixture in his life as sure as the earth beneath his feet or the distant rush of the river. She’ll live forever.
…
Free Zaun. Kill Vander. Keep Jinx.
He’s only ever wanted three things in his life. It isn’t, in theory, too much to ask. But he should have seen this coming.
Free Zaun. Keep Jinx.
It should really be a harder choice than it is. But from the moment the young, foolish Councillor offers the ultimatum, Silco knows it’s over.
…
This is what it comes to: Jinx cradles his face gently and he looks into her shimmer-pink eyes and it is nothing at all like drowning. Maybe it would feel similar if they had been blue, but that isn’t her anymore. This, he thinks, is what his little girl looks like, fully realized. She is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. Perfect, perfect.
It takes Silco less than a second to realize what’s happened; he knows it before the pain hits. And, oh, she’s apologizing now. Frantically, like she’s afraid. Begging forgiveness, truly. For what? He thinks. Oh, that. The bullets in his chest. That’s nothing. You did everything right, you know. I’m proud of you. I love you. It’s so warm now. Not like river water in the lungs. Drove the cold right out of me, didn’t you, child? He doesn’t say any of those things, largely because one of his lungs seems to have been punctured. The air he’s breathing hurts quite a bit as it goes down, and he can’t seem to take enough in. Still, he gets the important parts out.
It’s true. He would never have given her up– could never have given her up. Forgive me my hypocrisy, Vander– I’d abandon it all for this.
The sister is shocked into silence, or perhaps more concerned with her pet enforcer. What was Violet saying before? Something about leaving him behind– “you’ll never have to see him again.” Beneath the burning in his chest, there’s a sense of mean, base satisfaction, because he knows how this works, knows how Jinx’s mind works in all the ways Vi never will, and knows Jinx will never leave him behind, not now. His spirit will stay with her until the end of time. He’ll never abandon her.
And what of that other remnant of her past? With Jinx at his feet, quiet and soft the way she never is, he begins to doubt that Powder really drowned in that river where he nearly did all those years ago. He can see her in the simple grief clouding Jinx’s eyes, in the unguarded slope of her shoulders. He should have known better, should never have dismissed this girl as weak. He sees it now: since that first day, since the very first time he held her, Powder has been quietly fighting to survive. Of course she’s still here. She’s what keeps Jinx breathing, feeling, mind whirring, so incredibly alive. That faint, fragile, persistent little heartbeat. How could he ever try to extinguish her? Powder’s identity, after all, is just another aspect of Jinx, the same as her mother’s chin, father’s double-jointed thumbs, sister’s frankly awful sense of humor, brothers’ ghosts, Vander’s temper, Silco’s theatricality. There’s so much of her. Larger than her body, larger than the city, larger than life, impossible to contain. And all of it is her– all those parts, all those gears, turning, working, making up Jinx. Jinx, the best and most destructive thing to ever enter his life.
But Jinx is crying now. Oh, he can’t have that. He tries to lift his hand, to swipe a thumb under her eye, but can’t muster the energy for more than a twitch.
It’s not dying. Not really. Jinx will see him again.
“Don’t cry.”
He can hear his own heart slowing.
“You’re perfect.”
Slow, slow, slow. He thinks, dimly, that it’s a shame he never did get around to washing her hair. There’s dried blood in it, dark red on blue.
Have you had enough?
Jinx, the flare that lit up the night when he crawled out of the wreckage of the eye. Jinx, the perfectly formed chrysalis-rebirth of a child desperate to live. Jinx, the immortal legacy he never thought to cultivate. Jinx, the ruin of all his best-laid plans. Jinx, his triumph. Jinx, his undoing. How could she not be enough?