Chapter Text
Floating over the Demacian mountains, it occurred to Jinx that she had no idea how to actually land an airship. Repair one? Sure, no problem. Fly one? This was her second rodeo, thank you very much. But land it? She’d be lucky to survive. She had been hoping to fly somewhere with a nice, flat place to crash slowly into and probably live, but now she was over massive, wooded mountains with big, feathery raptors with sharp claws and beaks trailing her. She could try to land in a controlled way and maybe die, or she could let the raptors rip into the canvas of the airship and definitely die.
Currently she was hurtling towards “Maybe die.”
Her face was wet. Not the kind of cold, thin wet from tears, but a hot, heavy wetness that was equally familiar. All she could smell was metal. All she could taste was metal. All she could see was… She blinked. Once, twice, three times. Trying to clear the blood from her lashes. Her left eye came back into focus, blades of grass breaking up her view of the airship wreckage.
Her right eye didn’t.
She blinked again and again. And again.
Nothing.
A sick feeling crawled up her spine, and latched itself to the back of her head. She was being watched. Could be one of those damned raptors, coming to finish its kill. Maybe a different beast attracted to the noise.
Or worse, a person.
She rolled from her left side to her back, hoping to see what it could be. To her left, her view was blocked by the airship. To her right, darkness. Only darkness. She twisted her head to the right, left eye searching the expanse of the clearing.
Like a star winking out, a flash of golden blonde hair disappeared into the trees.
A person, then.
The woman at the end of her gun reminded her an awful lot of someone else she’d once pointed a gun at.
She was tall, blonde, and her hands, framing her face in surrender, were glowing. Jinx shifted her grip on her gun, her one eye struggling to focus. Under normal circumstances, her sidearm would have remained safely holstered. But her newly halved field of view had her twitching like a cornered animal. Unfortunately blondie here was in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was no static, no waves, nothing jumping at her or screaming in her ears.
“You’re hurt.” The woman’s voice was bright like her hands, but lacking in the warmth that light should bring. Jinx thought she raised an eyebrow, but her face hurt so bad all over she couldn’t tell.
“No shit, Blondie. Crashed a damn airship.”
“I can see that.” The woman lowered her hands, and Jinx’s gun followed as if connected by a thread. Her hands no longer glowed; the sunlight seemed to follow her, bending out of her path like smoke as she took a step forward into the clearing. Jinx’s movements mirrored hers, a pull in her stomach making her step closer and closer until a scant few feet were left between them.
The woman’s eyes were blindingly blue. Blue like a hextech gemstone.
Blue like Powder’s were.
“Can I help?” The woman took one more step forward, but Jinx took one step back, keeping the same distance between them.
“No.” This was her mess to fix. She might not be able to, but that was her burden to bear.
“Are you sure?” Another set of steps.
“Just fuck off, Blondie.” Jinx had fled, leaving a city she broke behind. She couldn’t shirk this too.
The woman reached behind her for her bag, and Jinx reached for her gun. But all Blondie did was take off her bag and leave it on the ground between them.
Then she turned and left, leaving Jinx alone in the wreckage of her life.
Ping
Ping
Ping
Jinx’s hand stilled right before she let go of the rock, letting it fell into the leaves at her feet with a soft plop. Somewhere behind her, she heard the softest rustle. Moments later, a twig cracking. A sharp “Shush!” made her whip her head to the right in an attempt to eliminate her new blind spot. Her face tightened in anticipation of braids that never came, replaced by the soft tickle of short bangs on abused skin.
So much change.
Into her clearing stepped Blondie, trailed by half a dozen people, a mix of adults and children. She hadn’t expected to see her again, even though the woman had left her with a bag of some meager supplies.
“Blondie, thought I told you to fuck off!” She tucked her hand into her pocket, pulling out a smooth rock to fidget with as she studied the group in front of her. Blondie was wearing what had to be the least practical armor she’d ever seen, and held a short staff, the ends of which crackled with light. The six people with her looked worn, frightened. A small girl buried her head into her mother’s neck when Jinx set her eyes—eye—upon her, as if to hide from her broken gaze. “And you brought friends!”
“My name is Lux.” Her tone contained no hostility, no defensiveness, none of anything, really. Not even the brightness from when they had first spoken. “Can that airship be repaired?”
“Sure, if you’ve got some magicians or something.” Blondie raised an eyebrow at that and glanced at the people behind her.
“They’re… mages, yes.”
Only Jinx’s heightened reflexes kept her from dropping the rock she was fiddling with. She’d never thought much past Zaun’s borders, but even she knew that Demacia famously hated mages. Enough of them had made their way to Zaun, shells of themselves, getting lost in Shimmer to ease the pain of a life ripped away.
And here were seven Demacian mages standing right in front of her.
“Don’t suppose anyone can fix my face?”
No one had been able to fix her face, but Lux’s gentle hands had cleaned and bandaged and soothed far better than Jinx had been able to do herself. The last person who had done such a thing was lost to her now. Had been back in her reach for just long enough to truly know what she had left behind. They didn’t speak very much, which was just fine with her. She wasn’t ready to talk about the civil war she’d started, the Noxians, the glorious evolution, or the bodies. So many bodies, all slumped, bloodied, torn, gashed, piled up.
Lux didn’t seem like she wanted to talk about anything either, but Jinx saw the way the mages interacted, heard what they whispered to each other when Lux wasn’t looking. Lux had started a civil war, too. They were the same. Three days after Lux had shown up, it was time to burst their tentative bubble.
“So, Blondie, what’s the plan here?” Lux’s hands stilled where they were replacing the cloth over her eye. They didn’t have bandages, just strips of cloth pulled off of their clothes and rinsed in a stream nearby. It was a kindness from the Demacians that she never received in Zaun. It was more than good enough for her. “Going back to finish what you started?”
“Excuse me?” Her eyes were blinding, attempting to intimidate, but Jinx had seen things far scarier than Lux, with her gentle hands and kind soul.
“Start an uprising and run away from it?” Jinx tilted her head to the side and shrugged. “Tried that, makes it worse.”
“Stop moving—and I didn’t start any uprising!” Lux’s hands started moving again, faster, trying to finish and get away. Jinx had that effect on people, at least that hadn’t changed.
“Sure, Blondie.”
Lux finished, tying the final knot below her ear to hold in place the cloth wrapped around her head. But she didn’t move away. She looked down at her hands, the glow around them just barely visible in the sunlight.
“Sylas, he did it. He got out, and he just started rampaging.”
“Who got him out?” Jinx asked. Lux gave her one of her should-be-intimidating looks, but cracked, unable to hold the gaze. “That’s what I thought.”
It was the first time Jinx had seen Lux look anything less than composed. Her hands itched to fix it and found their way into Lux’s. The first time they had touched out of want, not of necessity. She squeezed gently, and Lux met her eyes–eye once more.
“Look, Blondie, I can’t judge you. Whatever you’ve done, I did ten times and worse. We’ll figure it out.”
Lux tugged on her hands, pulling their bodies flush and wrapping her arms around Jinx. Lux was hugging her. When was the last time someone hugged her?
She slid her arms around Lux, the motion dusty and moth bitten, but comfortable, like an old blanket stashed away in the attic. The taller woman rested her cheek against Jinx’s hair.
“My name’s not Blondie, it’s Lux.”
“Yeah, mine’s Jinx.”
It had taken another week to get the airship into flying shape, and it was slow going in the air. They hadn’t quite decided where to go yet or what to do with the six mages—two of them children—that were with them. Nearly any country would be a better option than Demacia, but with the children involved, it wasn’t like they could just be dropped anywhere.
“We can’t drop them in Noxus, Jinx.” Lux argued.
“It’ll take months to get to Ionia or Bilgewater. We don’t have months.” Jinx argued back. They barely had enough supplies on board for another two weeks.
“What about Piltover?” Lux asked. Jinx froze completely, caught for a moment in her head. She hadn’t been fully honest with Lux about what had happened, her role, in everything that had happened in Zaun and Piltover. That could stay buried.
“No, it’s still too far away.” It wasn’t, and Lux knew that too. “Noxus will be fine, their military got decimated anyway.”
“10% less Noxian soldiers is still a lot of Noxian soldiers,” Lux quipped. Jinx rolled her eye even as she smiled. Lux was pedantic to a fault, and it would annoy her if Lux wasn’t so sincere about it.
“Devastated, then.”
“Whatever, I’m not dropping my people into Noxus, they’ll be killed on sight or worse.” Lux said firmly. “What about Ixtal? We can resupply and go somewhere nice and warm afterwards.”
Jinx shrugged. “Probably better than fuckin’ Demacia.”
They dropped the six mages in Ixtal and continued on, their own destination uncertain.