Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Silco is far from the best father.

He knows it. He understands it. He feels the glares from Sevika when Jinx is in his office, the same dark looks he got when she was ten to the looks he gets now that Jinx is seventeen.

But he doesn’t hate himself for it. Not at all.

Jinx trusts him. She tells him everything, shows him whatever brilliant little thing she invents, goes wherever he tells her without a second thought, lets him braid her hair and trusts every word out his mouth.

Jinx loves him. She smiles at him, all but leaps on him at every opportunity, and would wait up for him at night and make him read to her as a youngling.

Thus, he must be doing something right. Why would he blame himself for doing some unknown thing right?

And even the biggest question of his parenting skills is justifiable.

The night he'd found her, Jinx had been inconsolable. Uncontrollable sobbing, hardly able to get a word out, rocking back-and-forth like a child possessed, hitting herself the second Silco wasn't there to hold her hands…

So yes, he'd made her chamomile tea and slipped something in.

He hadn't felt good about it. Giving a grieving ten-year-old girl tea laced with pain medication to calm her down? He'd outright felt like scum as he stirred it in. She had said she’d never had tea before. She wouldn't know.

But when she drank it, she settled. Powder (at the time) had gotten sleepy half through the cup, holding it up to her lips with both hands because she couldn't control her hands due to how tired she was.

Jinx had only woken up crying once after the tea, and Silco had easily soothed her from where he had taken up post with her head on his lap, too much risk in moving her.

It had been better. She was a child and needed sleep. Silco could easily justify the opioids in Jinx’s nightly tea.

And then he started giving her different drugs in the tea. It started when she was depressed, one of her first up-and-down episodes, when she was twelve. She couldn't do much but cry and call out at the voices she was hearing but nobody else could.

He gave her mint tea and told her it brought happiness. It was chock-full of things to push her to the upswing, Adderall and a drop of Shimmer. She'd come out of her blanket pile ten minutes later chattering about an idea for some kind of printer so fast he only caught every third word and hanging off him like a monkey.

That was when Silco knew he had made the right decision.

She was brilliant, but she needed help. Help staying on track, help keeping the bad days from swallowing her whole, help keeping the voices at bay. And if a bit of laced tea could help her, who was he to deny her that?

Sevika disapproved. She never said it outright, but she didn't have to. Silco saw it in the way her eyes lingered on the cups and tea bags and syrups and pills in his office, kept just for his daughter. He saw it in the way her lips pressed thin when Jinx oscillated between bouncing off the walls with energy one day and curled up in a slurring heap the next.

But she had little to disapprove of.

Silco gave her one of three teas to start - mint (up), chamomile (sleep), elderberry (glassy and calm). All of them worked. And yes, all of them were laced, but he was careful. He was the only one allowed to give Jinx tea, and it was, in part, because he controlled the dose carefully. She wouldn't overdose. She wouldn't get addicted. He gave her tiny amounts.

They all helped her. He was doing nothing wrong. He didn't make her drink it. She chose to.

It was only when she was older that he became... more questionable with the tea. That is where he holds the guilt.

On the first job he sent her on, wrapped in armor to keep her nice and safe and with a gun and four of his most trusted men at thirteen years old, she had come home with Sevika holding the back of her neck and Jinx sobbing.

She didn't want to hurt anyone. She wanted to read her books and work on her gadgets.

On the job the next day, Silco gave her green tea, mixed with enough pills to make Jinx space out. He knew what it would do. She wouldn't know what was happening. He went along with her, held her hands, told the glassy-eyed little girl that it was okay to shoot them because they weren't real, do they feel real, Jinx, pull the trigger, see, you didn't feel anything, did you?

She hadn't.

The first time, Jinx had flinched when the gun had kicked back, but she hadn't had an emotional reaction. The second time, she barely registered it. The third time, she laughed and told him it was like shooting a paper doll.

Silco had stroked her hair that night as she lay in his lap, still humming to herself, eyes half-lidded and hazy. She mumbled nonsense, and Silco, ever the doting father, had told her how proud he was.

It became easier after that.

She was volatile on jobs, and his own men were likely to get shot, as Jinx's numbness extended to 'very few people are real enough to get shot and have it impact me,' but Silco simply assigned his least favorites to her side.

Jinx, though, was predictable to Silco.

After every job, she'd come to his office, legs across his lap, rubbing against him like a cat, and ask if he was happy. And Silco would make her tea and pat the top of her head and tell her that 'yes, very happy, I'm very proud.'

It was when she was fourteen that he added the last tea. Lavender.

She had an episode. Thought the dead had come to haunt her, screamed and cried and thrown things, shooting at shadows in her room.

When Silco had gone to help, to comfort and hold, she had shoved him, screeching at something he couldn't see.

An hour after he left, she'd slunk into his office, still far away but with enough presence to apologize.

Silco had made her a new tea. He had to be far more careful. He knew how dangerous it was to overdose on it.

She had drunk it without complaint, only pausing to hiccup tears into her teacup, and when it kicked in, it was night-and-day difference in her behavior.

Gone was the Jinx who had shoved him back.

She was acting like a child, helpless and dependent, clutching at him, looking up at him with big, adoring, cloudy blue eyes, slurring mumbles of how much she loved him. She sobbed when he left her side, and while she swatted the air and wailed about the ghosts, it was enough to have him pet her head to soothe her.

The next time she had lavender tea, it was because Silco missed her. Jinx was growing fast, too busy swinging through the maniacal inventing of everything from bombs and guns to building her own computer and coding DNA on it to be affectionate beyond hiding in the rafters of his office when she was unstable and her nightly tea and hug.

So he gave her the tea.

It was worse that time. She'd cried most of it, whimpering in pain and fear and batting at the air, but she still clutched at him, still soft and pliant and utterly dependent on him.

He kept giving her the tea, slowly tapering off the dose over four days.

By the time she was sleeping the remnants off and Silco returned to work, he felt whole again, and when she stumbled into his office with midnight circles beneath her eyes and a blanket around her shoulders later, she had collapsed into his lap like it had taken all her energy.

"Why do you drink that tea if it makes you feel like this?" Jinx had asked, temple against his collarbone, because she thought that was what tea did to everyone. "I don't think I like lavender."

"It's my favorite." he said, rebraiding the end of her hair, down to her knees at the time. "Tea helps, Jinx. It makes it all go quiet."

She had agreed. The teas increased in frequency. Several a day. Higher doses.

Jinx began to seem sick.

She was always thin, but what little appetite she had disappeared. She refused food unless Sevika practically forced it down her throat, and as a result, she became skin and bones. Her ribs and hips were very visible, and she was light enough that even Silco, not strong enough to even move his desk, was able to support her as she swung around him, arms around his neck and legs shooting out under his arm. She only slept if Silco gave her chamomile or lavender, and even then, only for a few hours. Her mood swings got worse.

Sevika's stares became deathly, less guarded. One of his employees commented that Jinx looked more like a ghost than a girl.

But it didn't matter.

Jinx was his daughter, and she was brilliant. His brilliant little girl, who still swung from the rafters of his office like she had when she was younger, who still chattered to him at incomprehensible speeds, who still trusted him enough to down even the lavender tea without complaint.

She still loved him. She still trusted him. She still needed him.

So when she slumped on his lap after another sleepless night, body trembling from exhaustion and cold, lips complaining of feeling dizzy and like she was floating (it had been days since her last green tea, she should have felt real), Silco brushed a hand over her too-thin back and made her another cup of tea.

-

It's when she's seventeen that Silco knows he's a bad father.

She messed up a job. It wasn't her fault, she had seen someone who looked like Violet and had frozen as a result, unsure if she was even in reality, but it had been public. Everyone knew something was going on, that there was a 'terrorist' from the Undercity between the attacks on the docks and Jinx killing half a dozen Enforcers.

So the Enforcers and Marcus had come for a meeting.

Silco was already stressed. Jinx was wasting away, refusing all food but the tea until she was fainting and he had to coax it down her throat, and Violet was back.

Jinx had been angry. Stabbed him with his injector and demanded answers. He had told her her sister was dead, after all - why wouldn't she be angry and confused and turn to her beloved father for answers?

It was simple to explain.

"The timing isn't an accident." Silco had soothed, setting aside the device even as blood and Shimmer dripped from the needle wounds on his face. "They know what you've done and want to take it back."

For his brilliant, prodigal daughter, gifted enough to design both organic material and print live birds and new species of plants with the 3D organic printer she'd built and figure out how to reverse gravity or power the whole Undercity with a simple device the size of a barrel, had figured out HexTech. Piltover's pride and joy, and his daughter had not only reverse-engineered it based on glances at the original product and the power source, but she'd improved it. She created a better version of HexTech in less than a few days.

And the timing truly is suspect.

Jinx's face crumpled as she shook her head, braids thumping against the desk. "No. No, she's my sister. She loves me."

"She left you," Silco had said, "she's using you," and Jinx had all but dived into his touch, sobbing into his shoulder.

And for all he knew, it was true.

He had barely managed to calm her down and coax her into working on her little insects (she was fixated on crickets at the moment) before they got here.

And now they're telling her to hand her over.

"The people are scared." Marcus says, elbows on his bouncing knees. "They saw Jinx attack. Between her other attacks in the past... they're terrified."

"And what do you want me to do?" Silco asks, raising an eyebrow and leaning back. "They aren't my people."

"We need to borrow Jinx." Marcus blurts.

Silco is immediately on-edge. "I'm not selling you Jinx for your people's sense of security."

"The council," Marcus sighs, "is ready to offer a deal. They want to free Zaun. Allow free government, no more trade restrictions... complete separation and withdrawal. Zaun would be free."

Silco can't help but feel torn.

Because Jinx is his. His to love, to protect, to parent, his little girl, and he could never give her up.

But the freedom of Zaun...

"I," Silco says after too long of silence, "refuse to give you Jinx."

Marcus shakes his head. "No. Not forever. Borrow. We stage an arrest. It's controlled, safe, public. The people think she's in Stillwater. We process her, put out mugshots, make it seem like she's in prison - but in reality, she's returned as soon as she's fingerprinted and photographed. We say she died in prison. You get Jinx back. Keep your operations in Zaun, we leave both of you alone for good."

Silco doesn't answer immediately.

He's been fighting for freedom in Zaun since even before he was reborn in the river. Jinx has been fighting just as much as him, if not more, since she was thirteen.

He's spent his life fighting for it, watching people bleed and die and rot under Piltover's boot, clawing and crawling and poisoning and killing for the dream that Zaun is not lesser. That no child in the Undercity would grow up starving or sick.

"Jinx terrifies them. If we just make a show of taking her into custody, it'll all be over. Zaun will be free, as will both of you. Jinx won't see the inside of a cell. She'll be kept safe. You have my word."

Silco remembers Felicia. Jinx's mother and his own best friend, dead in the fight for freedom. She could have died for something.

The Undercity can be free.

And Jinx will be safe.

She's fought as hard as he has. And she loves him. She'll forgive him.

...But what if she doesn't?

No. He can't tell her he was behind it. He'll lose his little girl.

Silco gets an idea that makes him feel sick.

"If she is harmed in this deal. If she is not returned to me alive within twenty-four hours." Silco hisses. "Piltover will be burned to the ground, and nobody will be spared until she is returned to me whole and safe."

"Deal." Marcus says easily. "I have a daughter too, Silco. I understand."

Silco finds himself to be a bad father in that moment.

"I will send her to the bridge between the cities at the midpoint tomorrow." Silco chokes the words out. "You will send men sworn to nonviolence. She will fight back. You will not harm her."

Marcus nods. "We'll make it look real, but she will be safe. I promise."

Silco stares past Marcus, eyes unfocused. This is for Zaun. This is for the future.

This is for Jinx. Eventually, Piltover would have pursued her. This way, she's safe.

Jinx will forgive him.

She always forgives him.

-

He spends the next hour sitting in his chair and staring at nothing before the door creaks open and an electric-blue head pokes in.

"Hey!" she says, smiling in a way that shows the gap in her teeth, and it becomes even harder to breathe.

She doesn't seem to pick up on it, sliding into the office and vaulting onto the desk, legs crossing under her as she reads the papers under her upside-down.

"How was the meeting?" she asks.

Silco swallows the lump in his throat, and it's a long time before he's able to answer. "Fine. You know how they annoy me."

Jinx grins. "Yeah. Wanna see something?"

"Yes, of course." Silco says, forcing himself to focus.

She holds out a closed hand before opening it to reveal a cricket.

"Ta-da!" Jinx beams. "His name is Jiminy Cricket. Get it?"

Silco just stares at the little insect. It's pink and blue, clearly coded by Jinx to be so, and it sits still and docile, hardly moving beyond its antennae.

"He's kinda stupid. I messed up his neural network a little." Jinx frowns, pulling it closer to her and holding it up to her wide blue eyes. "But it's okay. He's cute. See?"

She holds it back out to him with pride, grinning like this is her proudest accomplishment.

The thing chirps twice, and Jinx beams, looking at it up-close again. "See? He's not too stupid!"

"Did you eat today, Jinx?" Silco asks, too aware that he can see the dip between the two bones in her forearm.

She scowls. "You and Sevika, I swear. You're obsessed with food or something."

Because you look like you're dying.

He forces himself to look at the cricket again. Jinx coded it. She programmed its DNA and then printed a living, breathing being. She’s created birds as well, pigeons flitting through her space under The Last Drop.

It's nothing compared to her. HexTech is nothing compared to her.

"I'll have some food brought in." he says. "You can work on the crickets later."

Jinx looks up at him and frowns, eyebrows creasing. She frowns more on one side than the other - she somehow absorbed that from him and his lack of control over the left side of his face. "Are you mad at me?"

Silco blinks in surprise, caught off guard. "What? No, of course not."

“You’re acting weird.” Jinx says, cradling the cricket against her chest. It chirps twice before settling. “Did I do something? Are you still mad about V-”

Jinx freezes before she finishes the word, cradling the cricket closer. She just waits, looking at him with big eyes.

“No, darling. I’m just tired. The bureaucrats are exhausting.” he says softly.

She squints, looking at him in that intensely focused way that makes him feel like she can see through him. After a minute, she relents.

“Do you want tea?” Jinx offers. “I can make it.”

The words hit him like a physical blow. His brilliant, beautiful daughter, offering to make him the thing that, looking at her, looking at her stomach where it’s displayed below her top and so painfully concave, is making her-

No. It’s not making her sick. She’s just lacking appetite. He can coax food into her.

“No. But we ought to eat dinner.” Silco says. “What would you like?”

Jinx wrinkles her nose. “I’m not hungry.”

“Jinx.” he says, voice sharper than he intended, and she shrinks. “You need to eat.”

“Later.” she tries to dismiss.

“Now.” Silco stands, moving to the door to call someone to bring food. When he returns, Jinx is still perched on his desk, but with her legs swinging. The movement makes the bones in her ankles visible, sharp against her skin.

She’s fiddling with the cricket’s wings, the poor insect docile under her touch.

“He can fly.” Jinx frowns. “His wings are fine. I think I messed up his memory. He can’t remember how to.”

Silco forces himself to swallow as he sits back down. “I assume you can fix the poor thing?”

“Yeah. I think I can use a chip in his head. Like the memory recall device!”

One of the first times Silco had been truly angry at her. She had implanted a device in her skull behind her ear, claiming it would make it so she could relive memories. It had only led to her collapsing at random, not being able to sleep, and falling and having a seizure. He forced her to let him remove it with a scalpel. She has a scar from it.

“He would be a good test subject anyway.” Jinx says, letting go of its wings and smoothing them back to their original shell with delicate strokes of her finger. “To fix the bugs. Ha! Get it?”

She looks back up at him, smile dimming. “Are you sure you’re not mad at me?”

No, just mad at myself.

“Simply worried. You’ve lost weight.” Silco says instead.

She scowls. “Well, yeah. I’ve been busy. Hexy over there doesn’t like me to take too much time away. If I lose my train of thought, it’ll take longer.”

It’s only because of her mind that they want her now. If she hadn’t figured HexTech out…

“Time is nothing compared to health.” Silco corrects. “Even if taking breaks to eat would add days to the final product-”

“But then I would lose something important.” Jinx frowns. “That’s probably why the Pilties who built it in the first place made it so inefficient. They probably took too many breaks and kept missing things.”

Now is the perfect time.

“Speaking of the Topsiders, I have a job for you.” he says, ignoring the vice tightening around his heart and squeezing it to bursting.

Jinx perks up, putting her cricket on her shoulder and dangling her hands in front of her knees. “Really?”

“The bridge to Piltover. There’s… to be a group of Enforcers tomorrow at the midpoint. I want you to go and listen in.”

Her grin turns excited, toothy. “I have some new grenades I want to-”

“No.” Silco says. “No weapons beyond your small ones and non-lethals. I don’t want any casualties. Just information.”

Jinx pouts, but her eyes have a sparkle that he knows means she doesn’t mean it. “Aw, you’re no fun.”

“Oh, I know.” Silco says, forcing a small smile. “You can do it, can’t you?”

“Obviously.” Jinx beams, bouncing slightly. “What time?”

He considers lying. Making it so she doesn’t go. He’s sure there’s someone else he can make take her place-

“Noon.” he says honestly. “Sevika and the twins will be with you. Simple intelligence. Do you understand?”

Jinx nods, still smiling. “Got it, boss.”

Silco tries to breathe.

“I’m not sure how long it will take,” he chokes out, “but as soon as you come back, I would like you to continue working on your organic projects.”

They’re the least important to the organization. Plants, birds, insects like her crickets, replacement body parts and organs - it doesn’t do much in a drug war and a revolution.

But it makes her happy. Perhaps making another one of her little songbirds, no matter how little its brain works (she complains constantly about issues with the neurons she constantly rewires) will help her calm down from being processed.

He knows what he’s going to say. That he didn’t know they would ‘notice’ her, that he negotiated to get her out of prison, that during that negotiation he told them they reverse-engineered and improved HexTech and that they would use it and in exchange for not using it for weapons they freed Zaun, that he’s not mad even though she was captured, because he knows she’ll immediately assume he’s disappointed for not fighting hard enough.

“Which one? If Sevika is free too, I can make improvements to her arm. I was thinking about making it so it could change, Like, she could hit a button, and it would fold out so it could go from a matching flesh arm to her normal metal one.” Jinx chatters. “I could 3D print her one that's both organic and metal.”

“It’s up to you. I simply want to see what you can come up with.” Silco lies.

Jinx looks so unbelievably happy - and why wouldn’t she be? He’s telling her to work on her favorite of her projects and sending her on a job, usually a signal he’s very pleased with her.

It’s only Silco who feels he may drown in guilt.

“I have some ideas. Bye! Love you!” Jinx beams, hopping off his desk and darting out of the room.

She isn’t around long enough for him to hear him say he loves her too.

She also isn’t there when soup is brought to him. He has it sent over to Jinx’s little workshop instead.

Silco sends tea with her food. Chamomile, with a higher dose than normal.

He needs her to eat and sleep. He’s not sure what she’ll do during processing if she doesn’t. In the morning, he’ll make sure she eats again, and he’ll give her a microdose of Valium and barbiturate from the lavender as well as the normal drugs in the green tea. Make her weak and confused and disassociated enough to go relatively quietly, yet not enough so that she can’t function or walk to the bridge. He can make it work. He gets her back safely and a free nation.

Silco buries his guilt, sits with a cup of his own elderberry tea, laced with the mild benzodiazepine that helps him think, and starts drafting plans for the nation of Zaun.

Chapter Text

The next morning, Jinx is perched in the cables of the bridge, looking down at where the Enforcers are supposed to show up in a few minutes. Sevika the ogre is hidden under the bridge, and one twin is about ten feet below her in the cables and the other with Sevika.

She leans her head on the thicker cable, enjoying the coolness against her forehead.

Jinx feels sick today. It’s not unusual - she usually feels sick, constantly cold, constantly shaky, her mouth dry unless tea is in hand or she’s puking again, just constantly wanting to go lay on the floor and wait to die, ya know, the usual - but normally, she’d just go to Silco for a cup of tea before holing up in her lab-slash-bedroom and claiming she was busy working on new guns or mines instead of going on an actual job.

But Silco gave it to her. He wasn’t mad about the incident with the pink-haired girl. He told her she could work on her bugs and birds when she came back. That means he’s happy, that means he needs her to do this, that means he’ll love her more if she just does what she’s told, so of course she came, even if she honestly just wants to curl up with both an ice pack and a ton of blankets.

Jinx settles for pressing as much of her boiling skin against the cold metal as she can instead, carefully keeping an ear out despite the mild tinnitus that’s ringing for Janna-knows-what-reason, focusing on the cold.

She doesn’t know how long she stays holed up like that. All she focuses on is making her ribs expand with air and the cold, because the air part is hard and the cold is nice, and Janna, Jinx wants to go home, but she needs to get the intel first.

If she just toughs it out and listens, she can go home, Silco will tell her how proud he is, they’ll have tea together and he’ll hug her before sending her off to work on her projects, and Jinx has an idea for a new pigeon - she has seven pigeons and a magpie and a songbird, she should have an even number of birds, that feels right - and she can get it printing before curling up to ride out the chills until Silco gives her one of the mixed tea blends.

She prefers those to the pure, honestly. The smaller amount of the lavender mixed with the chamomile means she doesn’t feel as sick as she does when she’s trying to drink a full cup while making her feel better.

She understands why Silco likes it the more she drinks it. It’s like medicine. It makes her feel less sick.

Jinx registers the sound of boots on the bridge, and she stirs.

She can’t hear them as the group of three Enforcers starts talking, so after a quick glance around and a nod from the twin close to her, she goes into a controlled fall.

Jinx drops behind them as quietly as she can, immediately falling into a crouch and pulling her minigun.

Something rustles behind her, hidden behind a carriage. She doesn’t turn fast enough.

There’s two loud pops, and Jinx’s first thought is that she didn’t fire Pow-Pow, what-

An Enforcer comes out holding a rifle. The other Enforcers all leap into action like it was planned, grabbing the twins and Sevika when they emerge. She barely processes before her leg crumples and she faceplants into the rubble, a brick hitting her jaw in a way that hurts like a bitch.

It’s absolutely nothing compared to the white-hot fire that starts licking up her left side, the bone in her leg feeling like it’s trying to smash itself with a hammer.

Jinx doesn’t scream. She doesn’t think she screams. Does she?

It’s a long minute before she’s able to get a shuddering breath in through her pain center catching on fire.

The ringing of blood in her ears almost covers the sound of screaming, and when Jinx manages to blink and her eyes focus a little bit, she can see Sevika lying on the ground, a baton smashing into her shoulder, taking the metal arm (Jinx worked so hard on that, leave her alone-) off with pure blunt force. She’s somehow tied up.

But Sevika’s not screaming in pain. She’s looking at Jinx.

Well, in her general direction, Jinx thinks.

“LEAVE HER ALONE!” Sevika screams. “LEAVE HER ALONE, SHE’S A KID-”

Jinx tries to push herself up, but her arms are shaking too much, and the burning in her leg turns nuclear when she shifts. The world blurs, then doubles. Her mouth tastes like copper and brick dust.

She doesn’t stop, though, she has to fight-

Something smashes into Jinx’s face, and her vision gets all prickly like that cactus she designed-

The Enforcer kicks her again, this time in the temple.

Everything goes black. She can’t see. All she can hear is the roaring of blood and ringing in her ears and someone screaming.

Until they kick her again.

This time, it’s in the nose, and it gives under the boot, sending a spurt of blood down her face and another sharp spike of pain straight to her brain.

It does wake her up, though.

Jinx thinks she even prefers Sevika waking her up by shoving her chair out from under her, her least favorite way to wake, to this.

Her mouth forms words, but they come out as a wet gurgle, blood sliding down her throat in a thick slab. Through blurry vision, she sees the Enforcer pull their leg back again, and Jinx tries to curl in on herself, protect her vital organs like Sevika taught her-

“YOU FUCKERS, LEAVE HER ALONE! SHE’S DOWN!”

The boot connects with Jinx’s ribs instead of her face this time. Something gives with a soft pop and a crunch that she feels more than she hears.

She tries to take a breath, but it feels like being stabbed.

For some reason, that’s when the pain actually, genuinely hits, and she screams.

Everything in her body kicks into overdrive as her entire body just starts shuddering uncontrollably in agony, and she starts trying to push herself away, trying to escape-

Someone grabs her ankle and pushes down on her thigh, and she screams so loudly that she can’t hear anything else as her lower leg is yanked out while her upper leg is held in place.

It sounds bad when she processes it. Like grinding metal, like when she got mad and would rip apart her gadgets, and then there’s a pop, and then her whole body arches and writhes and convulses with pain.

“YOU’RE KILLING HER! STOP! SHE’S SIXTEEN!”

If Jinx wasn’t in so much pain that she can’t stop her body from shifting and writhing and hitting itself on the rubble, she’d say ‘actually, I’m seventeen as of a week ago, you ogre,’ but there's no room for words or thought or anything but white-hot static.

The hands move to her hip and her thigh, and she screams so loud her vocal cord pops like a knuckle as they pull that out too.

“LEAVE HER ALONE! SHE’S A KID!”

Another pop and something shifting inside her, and Jinx is sobbing, wailing in a way she hasn’t in ages, and she can’t tell if there’s snot running down her face because her face is covered in blood already.

Someone grabs her by the shoulders, rolls her onto her back, and Jinx’s hands scrabble at the rubble, trying to find something, anything-

“Shut up!” the Enforcer shouts. “Shut the fuck up!”

Jinx can’t. Her lungs and diaphragm and everything in her has decided it could not possibly do anything but be as loud as possible, and she just keeps crying and screaming.

That’s when the brick comes to her throat.

She cuts off mid-scream, only able to make a choked wheeze as it presses down.

Her fingers come up and claw at his hands, at his face, his arms, the brick, anything, but it doesn’t do anything. She’s shaking too much.

After a minute, her vision starts getting so fuzzy that she can’t see, and the brick leaves.

Jinx coughs, chest heaving as she tries to catch her breath, but all that does is make her torso hurt more, her ribs stabbing and grinding.

“I’M GONNA FUCKING KILL YOU! GET AWAY FROM HER!”

Jinx gasps for air, her chest too tight, and for a minute, she’s left alone, and she thinks maybe Sevika saved her, maybe Silco-

Someone stomps on her stomach, and she pukes, and she can’t roll over-

He’s nice enough to take his boot off her stomach after a second, and she manages to roll over and spit it out before she aspirates.

“What do you know about the other terrorists?” he snarls. “The weapons?”

What other terrorists? Jinx is just Jinx. She talks to Sevika and Silco and a couple of his employees, and if she’s not on a job she’s in her lab working or asleep on Silco’s couch or in his rafters.

Jinx’s head feels fuzzy, like a worse version of the lavender tea Silco gives her when he’s sad and wants to be with her. She’s floating, and her head is full of spinning lights and static. She's floating, she's heavy, she's everything and nothing all at once, and the pain fades to an ache like when she staples herself when the voices won't shut up. She feels… thirsty. She wants water.

“Hey! What do you know?!” the Enforcer shouts, slapping her.

Jinx doesn’t remember what he wants to know. She honest-to-Janna doesn’t.

Janna. Now that’s an interesting thought process. Jinx should figure out how to see if the gods are real. That would be neat.

Her finger breaks.

She wails again, the pain coming back for a moment before it fades. She’d bet it’s blood loss or shock that’s making the pain less overwhelming. Oh, Janna, please, just leave her alone-

“Where are the other terrorists?” he snarls.

Jinx chomps on her lip, trying to stop its embarrassing trembling. She’s not a baby. She’s Jinx, not Powder.

She’s Jinx, not Powder.

She clings to that fact as he breaks the next finger. She’s Jinx. Silco’s daughter, Silco’s favorite weapon, someone feared and scary and-

Her head falls to the side anyway. Her muscles don’t seem to care that she’s Jinx, just that she’s hurt.

But that’s when she sees it.

A few feet away is one of her grenades.

He breaks another finger before taking hold of her arm and twisting her hand until her wrist burns.

Jinx can blow them up.

Silco will be mad at her anyway for not getting his information. She can make the pain stop. She can take all of them out.

When he goes to twist her shoulder, Jinx grits her teeth and lunges as best she can at the grenade.

Her nails brush it before she’s dragged back, struck once again.

“Tell me about the Firelights.” the Enforcer snarls.

Jinx screams again, this time in frustration as well as pain, desperately reaching for her grenade before he hits her forearm with the baton and she stops, the pain freezing her in place, leaving her broken body against the bloody rubble.

“Just kill her. She’s useless.” another Enforcer says from behind the one torturing her. “Get it over with.”

Jinx can hear Sevika roaring louder at that, threatening to rip them all apart, telling them to get away from her, but it doesn’t matter, because she just feels heavy, all her energy gone into the failed move to the grenade.

She does manage to struggle, though, when the Enforcer starts piling bricks on her.

He starts at her feet, putting bricks on her ankles, and she automatically kicks, though it forces another wheezing scream from her throat to move her legs. When she manages to look down, she sees that one leg is about a foot too long, and the other’s thigh is soaked in blood.

He slams one of the bricks onto her knee, and she cries out.

“I can bash your head in with one of these bricks or you can get buried alive.” he says, looking almost annoyed. “Just tell me what I want to know.”

Jinx shakes her head in confusion, but that gets her a snarl and a handful of debris dust thrown in her eyes, and she whimpers in pain as her eyes start tearing up without her consent once more. She uncontrollably squeezes them as tight as she can.

When she gets her eyes open, he’s grinning at her as he keeps piling the bricks on. It hurts, but Jinx is starting to feel foggy again, and she thanks Janna for that mercy. At least she’ll be out of it.

He stacks them higher. He puts one on her dislocated hip, too, and she cries out again. She sounds like a little kid. Humiliating.

He smashes one into her stomach, making her choke again, and her hands come up somehow to shove at it, and that hurts her broken fingers and screwed-up wrist and shoulder like crazy, but it’s nothing compared to getting it off her.

There’s a choked sound from the Enforcer, and then more weight on her legs.

Then the whole world erupts into chaos.

A swarm of Firelights swoop in, armed with spears just like the one sticking out of Jinx’s tormentor’s neck, and they start a full wipeout.

Jinx knows they hate her. They want to kill her. She watches the movements above her, watches them spin and fight and dive like birds, and she thinks about her birds at home. There was this one, a magpie she changed the DNA on, she just had to manually rewire a few neurons and it would be functional, she had a cage set up…

One drops, and she hears the hoverboard lower its power and stop moving as boots crunch on the rubble.

The Firelight stops in front of her with his gun drawn, feet steady against the rubble, and his owl mask tilts to the side as he observes her.

The leader makes a signal with his hand, and the rest of the Firelights freeze above the two of them, hardly moving except to stay balanced on their hoverboards. Jinx tries to snarl, but her heart is pounding and everything hurts, and she just makes a pathetic noise as she desperately reaches for her grenade again. She can take them down with her and keep them from torturing her. Her fingers are brushing it. She’s so close-

The bastard kicks it away.

She looks back up at him, and there is nothing else in the world except for fear and pain and this person who’s about to kill her. He’s pointing the gun in her face. At her forehead. Between her eyes. She’s about to die.

Jinx can hear Sevika shouting under the pounding of her heart. 

She’s not in control of herself. It’s why she’s shivering with cold and fear, why she can’t quite make her limbs or torso or head move right, why her chest and stomach are heaving despite what she wants, and that’s why, when she looks up the barrel at him, her head falls to the side, her swollen eyes squeeze shut, and she makes an utterly undignified noise.

He doesn’t shoot her.

In fact, when she realizes it’s only two bullets in her leg and none in her face and she looks, he’s lowered his fucking gun.

He raises his hand, and he lifts the mask, revealing a face that’s so familiar and so different, angry but scared and sad.

It takes a long second to recognize his face. It’s only when she looks in his brown eyes that she recognizes him.

“‘Kko?” she asks, voice small and weak and gurgling.

He nods at the others, pulls on his mask, kneels, and starts pulling the bricks off her legs after kicking the dead Enforcer off to the side and off of her.

They help.

Jinx watches, befuddled beyond just the concussion, as they free her, and when they get the rubble off her broken lower body, Ekko crouches next to her upper half.

She watches, unsure of what he’s going to do, her breath coming unevenly and her ribs screaming with every inhale. She waits for the finishing blow. She waits for Ekko to kill her.

He doesn’t.

He looks over her again, and after a moment, he goes to touch her leg with just his hand. No weapons, no bricks, just his outstretched fingers. As soon as he makes contact, it’s just a wave of pain.

No, no, don't touch, that hurts, that hurts, that hurts, stop!

Jinx kicks on autopilot, making another pathetic crying noise as it sends white-hot agony shooting up her leg. “No, no, no-”

Ekko, to his credit, pulls back.

He holds up his hands in a gesture of surrender, palms open and hovering next to his shoulders.

He only moves to pull up the mask again.

“Get away fr-” Jinx chokes out, but the movement makes her diaphragm spasm and she coughs. Something wet hits her lips.

Ekko’s eyes widen, and he drops his hands, staring at her like she’s just kicked his puppy.

He grabs her, yanking her up, one arm under her knees and one around her shoulders.

The position sets her body back on fire, the pain hitting her full-force again.

Jinx screams to the best of her ability, thrashing until it just makes her sob and go limp, vision checkering until she can’t even see what’s going on.

Hands hold her close, protectively, securely, and she’s jostled as he moves fast, and she only gets the strength to start struggling again when he steps on one of their stupid boards.

That time, she tries to kick the leg that’s too long, and that time, she blacks out for good.

Chapter Text

When Jinx slowly comes to, she doesn’t notice the pain at first.

The drumming behind her eyes? Yeah, but that’s not special. Some weird buzz in her body? Constant.

What is special is that she feels relatively pleasant despite the fact that she can’t move yet.

Her body is heavy, but she’s laying against something soft, cradling her. There’s something even softer under her head, and there are layers over her body, warm and heavy and soothing.

Well, most of her body. Her arms are cold, even if they’re cradled the same as the rest of her, and her hands feel too far away from her.

Jinx only feels like this when she drinks lavender tea, this heaviness, but she doesn’t feel scared or numb or confused like normal. But she sleeps at her desk or on the floor unless Silco or Sevika carries her to bed, so she couldn’t be in bed unless they carried her, and they only carry her when she has lavender tea and can’t walk well enough to not fall on her way back to her little hideout.

She slowly blinks her eyes open, but she doesn’t see anything.

It’s all dark.

Jinx goes to grab at her eyes, make sure they’re still there, but she can’t move.

She immediately starts panicking, thrashing, because she should be able to move her hands, what-

And then the pain hits.

It’s like a current. One moment, she just feels heavy, and then it’s like she’s dragged under and thrown as hard as possible as it all just smacks into her like a brick to the head.

She screams before she can think.

She can’t see. She can hardly move. Her hands are immobile. She doesn’t know where she is or how she got here. And that’s on top of feeling like she’s been stomped on with steel boots with razors built into the bottom.

“Shh, shh, it’s okay-” a female voice says, and there are gentle hands on the top of her head and pressing down on the top of her ribcage. “You’re safe, hon-”

Jinx cries out again, trying to buck their hands off, but it just makes the back of her neck catch fire.

“Shh, calm down.” they say, petting the top of her head, and oh, she knows this one, that means it’s okay-

She goes limp on autopilot before she can think, muscle memory from years of Silco doing the same thing kicking in.

“There we go. See? It’s okay. Nobody’s going to hurt you.” the woman says, continuing to pet her head.

Jinx isn’t sure, but it might be her mom. She might be hearing things and feeling things again.

“I can’t see.” she sobs. “I can’t see.”

“It’s okay. There are bandages around your eyes. They were swollen and had debris in them, and that was on top of the boots to the head.” the woman says. “You’re going to be able to see soon.”

It takes another second of panicky thoughts and hot tears before it sinks in.

She can see.

That’s good. Everything else she can fix. She’s used her printer for new fingertips and to fill in deep gashes and things to do with her body before, but she’s never gotten delicate things like eyes and brains fully right. If her eyes were gone-

Wait. Her printer.

“Who are you? Where am I?” Jinx asks as she starts to panic again.

“My name is Jem. I’m the doctor here.” she says. “You're safe.”

Jinx starts struggling again. “Where am I?!”

“You're in our infirmary.” Jem says, petting her head again. Jinx jerks back this time, and it makes the inside of her head sound like she dropped an entire box of pots and pans.

She hisses in pain, and Jem stops, taking her hands away.

“The Firelights.” Jinx says after a long second. “I'm with you people?”

“You were in a bad place.” Jem sighs. “You were dying.”

“Was gonna be fine.”

“Want to hear the list?” Jem asks coolly. Jinx doesn't answer. “Two bullet wounds. Dislocated knee and hip. Bruised spinal cord in both your back and neck. Four broken ribs, three broken fingers, a massive concussion, blunt force trauma to your head and torso, a sprained wrist, a sprained shoulder, internal bleeding, and debris in your eyes. Plus withdrawal. Ekko barely got you here alive.”

Jinx winces. “I could've fixed it myself.”

"No." Jem sighs, and Jinx can feel the exhaustion in it.

"Where's Ekko?" Jinx asks. "How long have I been here?"

"He's busy, so he’s only able to visit sometimes, and you've been here almost four days. You’ve been in and out."

Silco. Silco must be losing it with worry.

Unless he's mad.

Everything in Jinx's body locks up even though that in and of itself burns.

Silco hasn't found her because he's mad. He's mad she got captured by the guards, he's mad she didn't fight back enough-

So he's not looking for her.

He hates her now.

Jinx chomps on her lip until the split reopens and she releases it in surprise at the pain.

She has to get out of here.

If she can get home, she can explain that she didn't see the one behind her, she didn't see him until the bullet tore through her leg, it was an accident, she'll do better-

“I want to go home.” Jinx chokes.

Jem sighs. “I'm sorry, honey, but that’s not an option.”

“Please just let me go. You can drop me on the street, I'll get back. I'm not expecting a ride or anything! You can just put me on the street and I'll go home.”

"We can't do that." Jem says.

Jinx starts squirming again. "I have to go home-"

"He's not looking for you." someone new says.

The voice is unfamiliar, and she tenses up.

"We just had a ransom meeting with him," the guy says, "and he's not wanting you back."

It's silent, both Jem and the new guy going quiet, even as the world ends.

Jinx realizes they must be mouthing at each other so she can’t hear.

"You're lying. He loves me." Jinx spits, but it doesn't work. She sounds scared, even to herself.

“He said you were a liability. To keep you.” the man says.

“This is Ethan, honey.” Jem says. “He's one of our intelligence.”

Jinx feels something squeeze tight somewhere in her stomach, twisting so much she might puke.

“Silco wouldn't say that.” Jinx protests, trying to move her arms. “He wouldn't abandon me. Sevika wouldn't abandon me.”

“They just did.” Ethan says.

Jinx makes the wise executive decision to start screaming again.

“Shh, shh, it’s okay- stop!” Jem says, pushing Jinx back down as she fights. “Stop!”

She’s been left again.

Her mom and dad died. She killed Mylo, Claggor, and Vander. Vi left her, not once but twice. Ekko disappeared on her.

And now Silco and Sevika, the last two people in the whole world she had left, just vanished.

She doesn’t stop screaming, and if she could move her arms, she would be hitting at Jem, but she can’t, so she just screams and screams and screams.

“Go away! Go away! Go-”

Jinx’s voice cracks, and her throat feels like she got punched in it, and she has to cut off mid-scream so it doesn’t shift to one of pain.

“It’s okay.” Jem says, petting her hair again even as Jinx jerks back. “It’s okay. Everything is okay.”

“Get- get it off me-” Jinx whispers, yanking at the ties around her wrists. “Get it off-”

They can’t keep her here. They have to be lying. Silco made her tea and braided her hair and understood when she screwed up, gave her the books she needed to learn biomechanics and math and engineering and finally understand the scientific aspect of what she made instead of ‘Meowser go boom if I do this,’ he raised her, he loves her-

‘Liability.’

Jinx screams again despite the pain.

Silco was acting weird the last time she saw him.

He knew she was going to screw up. He must’ve already been making plans to ditch her-

“NO!” Jinx screams. “LET ME GO!”

“Janna, we should just kill her-”

“Get out, Ethan!”

Jem puts a hand over her mouth, and Jinx almost goes to bite it, but then she realizes Jem is just trying to get a word in.

“We only put the restraints on because you were hurting yourself. If you stay in the bed and don’t pop stitches or move around too much, I’ll take them off, okay?”

Jinx nods.

If she can move her arms, she can free her eyes, and if she’s got that, she can drag herself back home even if she’s injured. Then she can explain it to Silco and he’ll forgive her or at least not let her go-

“I’m gonna be right back, okay, honey?” she says. “I have to get scissors.”

Jinx makes more uncontrollable, pitiful noises as soon as her mouth is free, and she hates it, but her throat is spasming with unshed tears and it’s making sounds that are beyond her control at the idea of Silco leaving her.

It’s only a minute before there’s snipping sounds next to her wrists, and when she pulls on her hands, she can move them.

Her entire body is thrumming with pain, but Jinx doesn’t care. She can move her hands.

And that means she can escape.

“Can you get Ekko?” Jinx asks, making her voice as high and pitiful as she can.

Jem goes quiet for a moment.

“Okay.” she says after a long time. “I’ll be back in less than five minutes. If you shout, there’s someone outside who can come help you. He’s set up so that you can’t leave the room, okay? You can’t leave, and you shouldn’t get up. I know you’re probably planning on it, but he’ll come running in if he hears something.”

Jinx nods jerkily, trying to figure out what she’s gonna do. “Okay.”

She hears footsteps retreating, and after a second, she hears a door shut.

As soon as she’s sure the woman is gone, Jinx is ripping the bandages off her eyes, even though her fingers are big and clumsy and awkward, and even though she immediately feels like she got stabbed in the face at the dim light and cool air in the room hitting her eyes, she can see.

Sure, it’s in blurry slits because her eyes aren’t opening that wide right now, but she can see.

She can see the scissors on the nightstand about a foot away from her.

She can see someone outside.

She can see the wood that makes up the ceiling.

And she can see her body.

She’s beat to shit.

Jinx is covered with a stack of dark brown blankets, and she’s wearing her normal top. Where she can see her stomach, it’s black and blue and with a long red stitched incision going from her belly button up under her top as well as a bunch of random cuts on her sides. Her arms are much the same, but one is splinted and neither are cut open. One of her hands has a ton of splints on her fingers.

She looks down towards her legs. They’re both bulky and up on a pillow.

It’s then that she realizes why Jem would let her arms go.

There are handcuffs around her ankle, hooked to a post near the bed.

She still can’t escape. Even if she could get past the guard.

Jinx just wants to go home.

But Silco disowned her. He hates her and he disowned her and left her to die at the hands of the Firelights.

She could explain! She could go after him and-

She thinks of Vi.

No. When someone says to leave you behind, there’s no fixing it.

She’s alone again.

She wants to scream more, but that’s just going to get the guy outside to come in.

Her chest is too tight. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do.

…If she doesn’t have anywhere else…

Jinx sets her eyes on the scissors and ignores the pain that makes her vision white as she twists around to grab them.

-

Ekko rests his head in his hands as he holds yet another meeting.

“She killed ours.” Scar says, resting his forehead on the dining table and smacking his fist into the surface next to his head every other word. “She blew our own up and you want to fake her death so that we can keep her.”

“Silco won’t stop looking otherwise.” Ekko says, voice muffled. “He’s not going to stop unless she dies or he thinks she has.”

“So we give her back!” Scar shouts, kicking the table leg at the same time he hits again. “We don’t need to keep a mass-murdering psychopath in the only good, safe place in the entire Undercity!”

“We’re not making her a Firelight!” Ekko protests, sitting up straight and glaring at him. “She’s a prisoner!”

“Well, she’s still here!”

Ekko can’t figure out how to explain it. How she was looking up at him with wide eyes that were terrified and hurt, how she was crying as she went for the grenade (she was planning to kill herself with them), how she said his name in a small voice that made him see Powder-

“We kill her and dump the body where he can find it or we just give her back. Either way, we can just be done.” Scar snaps. 

“We can use her.” Amy says, staring up at the tree above them. “She made Silco’s weapons. We can use her. Keep her locked in a lab and supervised. Tell her if she makes enough we can let her go. Day she runs out of ideas, we tell her she's going home, poison some water, bam. Problem solved." 

"For all we know, she'll make them faulty." 

"Then we kill her sooner if she doesn't cooperate." 

"We're not killing her." Ekko snaps. "Or did you forget her face is on our memorial wall?" 

"Powder's face. And there's a reason it's up there! She died the day she started killing ours!" 

Someone new walks into the meeting, and when Ekko glances over at the newly-occupied seat, it's Jem, eyes narrowed and lips thin. 

Jem's one of the oldest Firelights, barely in her fifties. She's the doctor for them, having trained in Piltover before it was even an option, and joined after a battle with Jinx killed her son, one of the earlier fighters.

"What do you think, Jem?" Ekko sighs. 

She purses her lips further, looking up at the branches for a long minute before exhaling. "My first impression is that Jinx isn’t organic." she says. 

"What does that even mean?!" Scar shouts, hitting the table again. "Jinx is a real person, clearly not a fucking engineering project, and she’s killed us!"

“'Jinx' as a persona isn’t organic." Jem says again. "Just very carefully manufactured." 

Scar still looks like he's fuming, but Ekko and the other three Firelights are paying close attention, so that counts for something. 

"Currently, as well as her injuries, Jinx is in severe drug withdrawal." Jem says. "When I took a look at her blood, there were nine separate chemical compounds that shouldn't be there. Shimmer, three types of pain medication including opioids close to heroin, stimulants, antidepressants, knockout drugs - if you can think of it, it's probably in her blood." 

"So she's an addict. She still killed them! And nobody forced her to take anything!" Scar glowers. 

That's what makes Ekko freeze. "Silco..." he mumbles. 

The pseudo-daughter of the biggest drug kingpin in the Undercity being an addict?

That seems… off.

"I don't know if she was drugged or if she took them willingly, but either way, the combination and levels even after days - I wouldn't be surprised if she wasn't present for half of what she did if she’s been on it since the start. And even if she did take it willingly, some of what it was... well, someone who's on a high dose of Valium and opioids isn't going to be a ruthless killer alone. Someone would have to point the gun and say to kill, and when someone's that confused and dissociated, they're not going to know better than to shoot." 

"Oh, yes, poor little Jinx, poor little murderer-" one of the others hisses. 

"Even without the drugs," Jem talks over them, "she's practically brainwashed. When Ethan lied and said Silco abandoned her, she started screaming. Not to mention, just- just look at her! She's severely malnourished and sleep-deprived, and she's hardly functioning right now. Every part of whoever she was has been suppressed with the drugs, and she's been built back up piece by piece into something different. 'Jinx' isn't an organic person. She was engineered and carefully crafted into what Silco wanted." 

"So how do we fix it?" Amy asks. 

Jem sighs, rubbing a hand over her forehead. "We help her break down. Undo what Silco and the drugs did." 

Scar scoffs. "How?" 

"It shouldn't be difficult. We let her clean out her system and go through withdrawal. Then we slowly acclimate her to people that aren't in the categories of Silco and his goons or enemies. I have her on methadone and some drugs to help her come down without dying-”

"So we just let her wander around base." 

"No, that's not what I'm saying." Jem sighs. "We keep her closely watched and control what she has access to. But putting her in a spot where she needs to be a person instead of a weapon should be enough to let her actual self come back, evolved as it may be." 

"So if we show her that life outside fighting exists," Ekko says slowly, trying to process, "she'll come back?" 

"Not the same. But the foundation of Powder should be steadier without the drugs, and there would be space for a real identity to develop." 

"So we're taking in an eighteen-year-old ten-year-old." Scar snarks. 

"No. She's mentally matured since she was a kid, she's just also been taught to behave like she’s younger and taken drugs to put her in a childlike state. If you remove the conditions of the brainwashing and drugs, she'll be more rational and act like her age." 

"Will she still be as smart?" Amy asks, still staring at the ceiling.

Jem huffs amusedly. “Smarter. A drugged-up cognitive rollercoaster isn't great for rationality and logic. When that's not going on, she'll be brilliant.”

Quiet reigns for a moment.

“If it doesn’t work, and she doesn’t change whatsoever and tries to hurt us,” Jem says, “I won’t fight you on putting her down. But it's worth a shot.”

It somehow goes even quieter.

“I vote we try it.” Amy says. “If nothing else, we can use her mind.”

Scar stays silent.

“I agree. We should try. Practically half the people here are reformed. The Firelights are about second chances.” one of the others says.

“We're following Jem's advice.” Ekko says. “What's the exact plan?”

Jem steeples her fingers, staring at the table as she thinks.

“Keep her in the infirmary until the withdrawal symptoms are near completely gone.” she says slowly. “Then move her to a standard room. Keep her there for a few days, let her acclimate to the new space, then take her out for short periods. Walk her around, have scheduled meals with specific people who don’t scare her, have small social interactions that aren't centered around expectations. When she starts noticeably adjusting, we start slow. Give her small projects, introduce her to bigger groups and situations. Nothing to be weaponized or dangerous, just enough to keep her occupied and start rebuilding herself again.”

Ekko nods along, as do most of the others. Scar still looks pissed.

“She still killed our own.” he mutters.

“And I'd bet that if we'd gotten to her four years ago, she wouldn't have.” Jem says. “So-”

A Firelight - Ethan, if Ekko's correct - drops in, sliding off his board behind Jem. “She stabbed herself.”

Jem whips around. “What?!”

“She tried to kill herself, I don't know-”

“Shit!” she hisses, standing up fast. “See? That's not a fucking psychopath! I'll deal with all of you later!”

Everything freezes for a moment before kicking into overdrive.

Ekko follows, hot on her heels as she makes a mad dash, leaving the meeting behind. Jem’s surprisingly fast, but so is Ekko, and he gets there only seconds after her.

Jinx is laying on the infirmary mattress, arms outstretched, and Ekko stops, rooted to the spot when he sees the deep gashes running vertically up her wrists and the stains on the bed.

No. No, no, no. This cannot be happening.

Chapter Text

When Jinx wakes up again, she feels… different.

It takes a long time to pry her eyelids open, but when she can, even if it’s not all the way, she looks up and realizes she’s in a different place than she fell asleep in. Hell, that she’s dressed differently than she fell asleep in.

After a minute of getting her bearings, she looks around, managing to turn her head to do so.

She’s under a blanket (much thinner, noticeably) again, but now she’s also wearing a dark blue sweater instead of her normal top. Her hair is loose and spilling over the edges of the much-thinner cot, someone having taken her braids out, and she has a tube thingamabob under her nose.

Most notable, though, is that the room doesn’t look like the short glimpse she got of the infirmary.

It’s smooth.

The walls and ceiling and floor all blend, not a circle but a square with rounded edges and corners, and there’s nothing in the room but the cot she’s laying on.

Well, that’s not true. There’s a dresser too.

It’s still empty. Unbearably so to someone like Jinx, whose home is covered in gadgets and tools and weapons and jars she likes and neon crayon-

She doesn’t like it.

Jinx immediately shifts, and her whole body instantly locks up at the pain that hits - not just her wrists, her whole body.

She feels sick. She feels shaky. Everything hurts and her mouth is dry and she wants to throw up.

What the hell did they do to her?

“They took you off the good stuff.” someone says. “Worried you’d get addicted.”

Jinx cranes her neck to look at the doorway, where someone in a mask with a beak is standing, arms crossed.

“More accurately, they’re trying to make sure you don’t get addicted to something else.” the person says, lifting the mask slightly to spit on the floor. “Me, I don’t care. They’re out here making all these excuses for you, but you’re still a sociopath. You’re still insane. And if you’re killing yourself with drugs, easier for the rest of us. It’s just like why I don’t think-”

The guy raps his knuckles on the smooth wall. “-the protective room is necessary. You want out, fine. Good. Saves us the trouble.”

Jinx lets her head fall back onto the cot (no pillow?) with a shuddery sigh.

Of course she’d be having an episode. Of course she’s out here hallucinating while in enemy territory.

“Who are you?” Jinx asks flatly. “You’re not Mylo or Claggor or Vi. Did I kill you? Is that why…”

She goes to wave her hand, but she gets distracted.

Mittens.

There are gouges on her forearms, maybe done with nails, maybe done with scalpels, and her hands are in mittens. There are also large white bandages taped over practically the whole insides of her wrists. One mitten is bulkier than the other because of the finger splints.

“What are you talking about?” he scoffs. "You're not dreaming." 

Jinx tries to pull off the mittens. The straps are done so that she can't take them off without fingers. Oh, those smart bastards... 

"Get up." the Firelight orders. "I don't care what's wrong with your legs. Get up." 

“I’m not getting up.” Jinx mumbles absentmindedly, trying to figure out how to get the mittens off. It’s just a puzzle. Her bombs are puzzles, the genes are puzzles, and if she can figure those out, she can get a pair of fucking mittens off.

“Up. Now.” he snarls, kicking the end of the cot. “Or you don’t get food.”

That’s when Jinx becomes acutely aware of the off feeling in her gut.

She wants tea.

No, not wanting, needing. She needs tea. Her mouth feels off, and she wants it more than anything. Something in her is screaming for it.

“Can I have tea?” she asks.

“If you get up.”

It takes a second.

Her body screams at her as she slowly tries to swing her legs, one having a top-to-bottom splint for the dislocated knee and hip and the other with bandages around the bullet wounds. She manages to get them on the floor, but she's clinging to the wall next to the cot as she tries to stand. 

She has to bite her lip to keep from screaming as she falls. 

"Well, that's pathetic." the Firelight laughs. "Get up. You're not going back to sleep until you walk." 

Jinx doesn't. Everything in her body hurts, like she was ripped apart and reassembled wrong, and she can’t- 

He grabs her elbow and yanks her up, pulling hard on her injured shoulder and forcing her pained legs to scream for her to stop. 

"Step. Now." he snarls. Jinx's head hurts. Everything hurts. She raises a mittened hand to her mouth and bites down as she starts to cry. She wants to go home. He steps on her foot. 

"Walk!" 

Jinx wants to go home. She doesn't have one anymore. Silco’s mad. He said to keep her. She cries harder. 

He lets go of her and shoves her over. "You're useless. I wish we were allowed to kill you." 

"Get out!" someone shouts. It hurts her head. "What the fuck is wrong with you?! Get out now!" 

"I was just-" 

"Out!" Jinx doesn't flinch at the shouting even though it hurts her head. She wants to die. She wants to go home. 

"Hey, hon, it's okay." Jem says softly, rushing over and holding her around her shoulders. "I'm not going to let him near you again." Jinx lifts her hands to press the heels of her hands into her temples, but then she can’t bite one, and she audibly sobs. She wants to go home. She wants to go home. She wants her workstation and her projects and Silco and her tea and to perch on the desk and have him lecture but forgive her. She even wants Sevika. 

"I know." Jem says, rubbing her back in circles. "Withdrawal plus pain plus a new place is pretty scary, huh?" 

Jinx sobs. "I want to go home." 

"I know you do." Jem says gently. "Home isn't safe for you." 

"Just let me go home. I want Silco-" 

"I know." Jem sighs. "But we can't." 

Jinx hits her hands against her head. Jem doesn't stop her. 

"I don't want to be here." 

"I know that too. But once you're through this and we think you're safe, we'll put you in a better room, okay? Would that be better?" 

"I want my room." Jinx says. "I want my tea." 

"Tea? Okay, I can get you some." Jem says, continuing to rub. Jinx relaxes before she can help it. 

"Can I- can I have chamomile?" She would feel better. She knows she would. The chamomile makes her feel heavy and sleepy and her brain quiet in a good way. 

"Yeah, of course." Jem says, helping her back to the cot, laying her back down, covering her back up with the blanket. Jinx’s hair is like a river with how it falls off the side of the cot and goes across the room.

“Why’d you take out my braids?” Jinx asks, looking at it.

“You had bullet casings braided into your hair.” Jem says, tucking Jinx in like a child. “Some of them had sharp edges. We were worried you would use them or the hair ties to hurt yourself. It’s the same reason you’re wearing the mittens and you’re in here. You’re not in any trouble, we’re just making sure you’re totally safe.”

It then clicks what’s going on.

“I’m on suicide watch.” Jinx sighs, closing her eyes. “Right.”

“In our defense, you tried to blow yourself up when Ekko found you, and as soon as you woke up and had the opportunity, you tried to stab yourself to death with surgical shears.”

Jinx ignores the frustration. “One-time thing.”

“How many times have you done things like that, honey?” Jem asks softly.

She doesn’t answer.

She doesn’t want to answer.

She doesn’t know the right answer.

Because, like, what even counts? Is she talking about on-purpose-she-wants-to-die, or she-knows-she-could-easily-die-doing-this-and-does-it-anyway? Because the first one is probably too high a number for what she wants, and the second one is impossible to count.

Jem sighs. “That’s what I thought.”

“It’s not like that.” Jinx dismisses easily.

“How?”

“It’s just different.”

She doesn’t know how to explain it. Most of the times she actually tried were just because of the voices or because she felt like she was a disappointment and Silco would be better off without her, and she wasn’t actually thinking it through half the times she did something reckless.

They’re all impulse. It’s not some big, dramatic plan when she does that, it just comes over her in a wave, and it just makes sense. Like of course she would go for the grenade, of course it would be natural to grab the shears-

Jem brushes some long strands of hair out of Jinx’s face before backing off. “I’ll be back with your tea, alright, hon?”

Jinx doesn’t answer.

-

As soon as Jem’s outside, she’s going after Djad, that little fucker.

“Hey!” she shouts when she sees him, leaning against a wall one room over like he’s completely innocent. “Hey, asshole!”

He rolls his eyes when he sees her coming. “Didn’t think doctors were supposed to insult-”

Djad stares at her in shock, hand touching his cheek where she backhanded him.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Jem snarls, grabbing his collar and yanking him down towards her (being 5’3 and in your fifties isn’t great for intimidating a six-foot guy in his twenties.)

“She’s Silco’s pet psychopath.” he says, voice neutral, like he’s still processing the hit. “We’re wasting resources.”

“She’s a teenage girl.” Jem spits. “One who’s been brainwashed. Do you have any idea what you’ve just done?”

He scoffs, trying to look away, but she drags him closer, tightening her grip on his collar. “Silco would have taught her that everybody in the world but him is out to get her. He would’ve told her that everyone else would hurt her. It’s why she literally tried to blow herself up when we caught her. We helped save her, we fixed her injuries, and within a few days, she would have at least started to trust us. But you just reinforced the idea that we’re going to hurt her. Do you know what that does? She’s going to think we’re waiting for her to recover to torture her. She’s not going to trust us. It’s going to take weeks to gain even a modicum of trust where we would have had it in a few days. You-” she shakes him. “-just ruined everything.”

“She killed ours.” Djad says, but his eyes are wide.

“She killed my godsdamn son, but do you see me sitting here forcing a girl who shouldn’t even be rolling over to walk? She’s confused. She’s scared. She’s been drugged-up and controlled, and you’re making things worse.”

“But you’re a professional.” he mumbles, suddenly looking abashed. “Like, you’re the doctor.”

“Got my PhD in psychology and a residency in emergency medicine from the Academy despite the fact that I’m from the damn Undercity.” Jem spits. “And that’s why you should fucking listen to me when I tell you that she’s mentally ill, unstable, and wasn’t in control of her actions. There is a reason we are considering her a psych patient.”

Jem forces herself to take a deep breath. “Nobody you know is going to be on rotation with her, and you are not going to be on rotations at all. You’re staying far away from all my patients from here on out.”

He scoffs. “Ekko’s the one who gets to reassign people.”

“Do you really want our leader to know? That you were forcing her up and making her walk around? That you were borderline torturing the girl he’s been religiously checking on? His friend?” Jem snaps. “I promise you, he’ll be far less kind about not following the orders to treat her well than I am being. So you will listen to me or I will rain hell on you, do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”  Djad says.

Jem lets him go with a shove, storming to the gardens to get some chamomile.

Her own feelings are very much so secondary to a patient’s needs.

-

Jem’s careful not to move fast as she re-enters the room, a chipped mug between her palms, rough from years of washing them twenty, thirty times a day.

“Hey, hon.” Jem says, staying a few feet away, making sure the girl has space. Jinx is curled on her side, hugging her arms around herself. Between the fact she’s small (it’s so odd, Jem had always imagined the terrorist-monster-enemy Jinx to be this terrifying, massive force of nature, but she’s barely over five foot and barely eighty pounds and about seventeen) and surrounded by things making her look smaller like the sweater and blanket and her hair (it’s a solid seven feet, how-), she looks frail.

“I brought your tea.”

Just like that, Jinx has gone from despondent to alert. She’s sitting up as fast as she can, looking at Jem with interest.

It’s a withdrawal craving.

She holds out her covered hands, and Jem obliges, holding the mug down. “Here, wrap both hands around it so you don’t drop it.”

Jinx scowls, even though she’s young enough it just looks like a child’s pout - at least, it does to Jem, but then again, she thinks twenty-year-olds look like they’re nine. “So I don’t get the mittens off.”

“Not until we’re sure you’re okay.” Jem says, making sure Jinx has a good hold on it before letting go.

“Like, what if I have to piss? How am I supposed to wash my hands?” she asks.

Jem huffs a small laugh. “Call for the guy outside, he’ll come take them off for that.”

Jinx scowls again, raising the cup to her mouth and taking a sip.

Jem isn’t sure what she’s expecting, but it’s not for Jinx to jerk and hold the cup as far out away from herself as she can, making a face.

“What is that?!” she snaps, looking at Jem like she’s betrayed her. “Did you put something in this?!”

“Just sugar, I swear.” Jem says.

“You made it wrong, it- what kind of tea is this?!” Jinx looks almost frantic, hollows under her eyes seeming darker.

“It’s chamomile. I picked and brewed it myself.” Jem says, holding up her hands in surrender.

“No, it’s not! Chamomile is really sweet and chalky!” Jinx snarls.

…sweet and chalky?

It clicks into place.

That’s not tea.

Jinx was drugged.

It’s why she’s craving the tea. Her body associates the two so strongly that she’s craving the drugs but thinks she wants tea.

“I must have brewed it wrong. Or maybe it was a different subspecies.” she says, forcing herself to seem calm, even as her mind sprints at breakneck speed. “Do you drink a lot of tea?”

She squints at Jem. “Why do you want to know?”

“You seem like a real tea expert.”

Jinx keeps looking at her in suspicion for a long second before she slowly starts talking. “I drink a lot of it.”

“What kinds? What do they taste like?” Jem presses.

Benzodiazepine. Valium. Heroin. Cocaine. Adderall. Two types of opioids. Stimulants. Valium. Morphine. Oxycodone. Xanax. Ambien. Shimmer. Serotonin inhibitors. All of them in her system.

Jinx looks at her strangely, but does speak. “...they taste like normal tea? I drink chamomile, mint, green, elderberry, and lavender. I like the mint and chamomile and elderberry most.”

Five teas, likely with different purposes.

“Why do you like them?” Jem asks, checking her nails, trying to be nonchalant.

“They help.” Jinx says slowly. “The mint makes me focus, chamomile makes me sleep, elderberry calms me down. Silco says it’s why he likes tea. It has strong natural effects.”

Oh, honey, nothing about that is natural.

“How did the green tea and lavender tea make you feel?” Jem asks lightly.

“...why are you asking?”

“I want to make sure the next tea is right.”

Jinx shifts again, taking another sip and making another face. “Ugh. Green made me dizzy and made it hard to see and feel stuff. Like, it made my brain work slower. Lavender was the worst. I would feel really sick for a few days. I was probably allergic or something.”

No, honey, you weren’t.

Jem would bet that was the Valium and heroin. Lavender with a high dose, green with sedatives and lower doses.

Oh, Janna, she doesn’t even know, does she?

“Why did the tea make you feel like that?” Jem asks, trying to assess.

Jinx sets the cup on the ground, almost knocking it over, hands clumsy and lacking in dexterity because of the thick fabric. “Because that’s tea. That’s what tea does.”

Oh, sweetheart…

“What happened if you stopped drinking it?” Jem asks, failing to keep her tone light. “Did you feel sick?”

Jinx flinches slightly. “What are you doing?”

“Just asking-”

“You’re asking a lot of questions. Why are you asking?” Jinx snaps, but her blue eyes are wide enough that Jem knows it’s fear rather than aggression.

Jem makes a decision.

“I drink a lot of tea.” she says, careful to keep her voice gentle. “And sure, chamomile makes me tired, but it doesn’t knock me out. That’s not a normal reaction.”

Jinx is paying rapt attention, and so Jem keeps going.

“When you were asleep, I did a blood test just to see if there was any infection. There wasn’t any, but there were a lot of different chemical compounds visible that shouldn’t be there.”

She’s starting to shake her head slightly. “I work in a lab. I get exposed to a lot of chemicals.”

“I know. It’s why I didn’t make assumptions about the burn scars on your arms.” Jem says gently. “But these aren’t lab chemicals. You don’t accidentally get opioids and sedatives into your system. Do you remember taking medicine?”

Jinx is shaking her head like she can’t stop herself. “The tea is just tea.”

“Honey, you’re in withdrawal. It’s probably part of why you feel bad. Your body is so used to being on that medication that it’s not okay without right now.”

“The tea was just tea.” Jinx repeats, lower lip getting clamped between her teeth.

“The tea I just gave you was chamomile. Plain chamomile. It tastes wrong because it’s clean, and it’s not making you sleepy because it’s not meant to.”

“He wouldn’t do that.”

“Were you ever allowed to choose your own teas or when you took them?” Jem asks, watching Jinx’s every move for any sign of self-harm. “Did you ever make your own or see him make it?”

Jinx’s mitten hands grab fistfuls of hair, tugging but not hard enough to hurt. Jem doesn’t intervene yet. “Silco loves me. He wouldn’t do that.”

Is it kicking her when she’s down?

“Silco might have loved you, honey, but he didn’t do a good job of it.” Jem says softly. “There’s a reason we knew where to find you.”

She goes completely rigid, even her eyes going unblinking as she stares at the blanket, not even breathing.

“Silco,” Jem says gently, “sold you out. We heard on Enforcer radios the night before the attack where you would be. Silco worked with the commander.”

Jinx doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, looking like a statue.

Jem hesitates.

“Honey, I’m sorry…” she says, reaching out to touch her.

That’s when she breaks.

Jinx lets out the most animalistic, inhuman sound Jem has ever heard, somewhere between a wail and a scream, and smashes her fists into her own head.

Jem acts fast, two years as the head psychiatrist in Piltover’s hospitals kicking in, pinning her with her body weight, not enough to cause any damage or pain but enough to keep Jinx from hurting herself as she fights.

“HE WOULDN’T!” Jinx howls, so much pain in the sound that it gives Jem pause. “HE LOVES ME!”

“I know, I know, sweetheart-” Jem says, and with her next wave of thrashing, she moves fast, grabbing Jinx so her arms are pinned under Jem’s burlier forearm while pulling the girl against her front. “I know, it’s gonna be okay-”

Jinx screams, fighting harder at Jem’s new embrace. “HE LOVES ME!”

Jem holds firm, keeping Jinx securely against her chest and keeping her arms pinned even as she screams and wails and claws the air, murmuring soothing nonsense.

Jinx is surprisingly strong for such a hurt, skinny little thing, but she’s running on fumes, and after a minute, she just goes limp, sobbing like there’s not enough air left in the world.

“I know, sweetheart, I’m sorry.” Jem says softly, slowly releasing her arms to adjust her position to be less of a restraint, broken little legs over Jem’s lap and forehead pressed into her collarbone.

“I’m sorry.” Jinx gasps, her whole body heaving. “I’m sorry. Let me go home, I c-can expl-lain- he’ll forgive me-”

“Why would he have to forgive you?” Jem asks softly, rubbing her back in circles.

“I s-screwed up-” Jinx sobs. “I must’ve- he loved me-”

Jem forces herself to take a deep breath. “You didn’t screw anything up, and even if you did, he shouldn’t have done any of that.”

Jinx shakes her head frantically. “I- I d-did-”

“Shh, it’s okay.” Jem soothes, smoothing her hair. “It’s okay. It’s not your fault.”

Jinx just sobs and sobs and sobs for a minute, and Jem rocks her like a child, and Jinx is completely quiet until she goes limp, completely boneless in her arms.

“Why didn’t he tell me?” she whispers after a long time, voice small and helpless.

“Because he knew you wouldn’t drink the tea or go into the trap if you knew.” Jem murmurs back.

“But I would’ve.” Jinx says, voice cracking. “I would’ve drunk the tea. I would’ve gone into the trap. I loved him. I trusted him. I- if he needed me to, I would have, why didn’t he-”

She goes silent again, but now, she doesn’t start crying. She just lays there, limp and spent.

Jem doesn’t know what to say.

Chapter Text

Jem takes several breaths outside the door, trying to muster the energy to enter the room.

It’s been four days since Jinx learned the truth, and ever since, she’s been…

Well, it was easier to deal with her when she was screaming and crying and panicking. Somehow less exhausting, less draining.

Jem pushes through the energy sap she knows is coming and walks in, balancing the meal carefully - a simple bowl of broth, a small pile of vegetables, a slice of bread, and a cup of pudding along with a glass of water.

Inside, she’s curled up in the blanket on the tiny windowsill, somehow managing to squeeze on. She’s looking out at the Firelights below, head resting on the thick, jump-proof glass, her hair like a waterfall onto the floor and her legs sprawled awkwardly, the splinted one straight out as the brace demands and the one with the (admittedly nicely-healing) bullet wounds hanging off the sill. Jem quietly walks to the side a little bit, checking that she hasn’t fallen asleep, and when she sees her lightless blue eyes half-lidded but open, she takes a deep breath.

“Hey, hon.” Jem says softly, bringing the tray over. “How are you feeling?”

Just like normal, she doesn’t react. She just stares out the window.

Jem sighs, setting it down on the smooth-edged, bolted-down dresser. "You need to eat, hon." 

That much is true. Jinx was already severely underweight, and between her injuries knocking her out for several days and her grief-induced starvation, as she's refused all food for all four days, she's much worse, looking like a breeze might blow her over with how agonizingly skeletal she is. If Jem can't coax food into her within the next day, she'll need to put her on a feeding tube.

But she can’t violate her autonomy like that. She’s been drugged against her will for Janna knows how long. Jem isn’t doing that until there’s no other choice.

“I used to work in Piltover.” Jem says, leaving the tray to go through the drawers, pulling out all the provided knitted sweaters to put on the empty cot to await folding. “I was one of the first people from the Undercity to graduate the Academy’s medical school. I studied emergency medicine, but ‘emergencies’ in Piltover weren’t usually too exciting, so I started working on a PhD while I was working in one of the less-busy emergency rooms. Got one in psychology, moved to the emergency psych ward. Worked with a lot of patients like you.”

Jem starts folding, uniform squares stacked on top of each other. “Even when I was head of the department, then head of the hospital, I still worked shifts there. It was hard seeing people that broken, but… putting them back together, that was something.”

She glances over. Jinx hasn’t moved.

“There was one boy, about your age. He’d lived a rough life. His dad was an abusive asshole, and when his mom left and took him with her, she got sick. Couldn’t be saved, just made comfortable. His dad tried to take him back, so he tried to kill himself. They saved him, of course, but he just wouldn’t stop trying. Every way you can think of until they brought him to me. I interviewed him and recommended he be institutionalized under my care.”

Jem sets aside the stack of sweaters, getting the leggings and repeating the process. “He stopped eating. Wouldn’t take anything we gave him. Janna, I tried, but he just wouldn’t. He hardly moved from his bed. Eventually, I got it out of him that he felt lost. He was scared to go back, but he was scared to move on, too. He didn’t know if the future would be good or bad, but it didn’t feel like he could have a good one even if he somehow moved forward instead of being pulled back by his father. So he wouldn’t eat. Said there wasn’t anything to eat for.”

Jem puts them back into the dresser. It looks the same. “Do you feel that way, honey?”

No answer. Jinx just pulls the blanket tighter.

“I loved it there, but I left because of my son.” Jem says. “Omar. I worked in Piltover, but… well, I’m from the Undercity. I couldn’t leave Zaun. So my wife, my son and daughter and I, we lived in the nice part of the Uppercity, but still Zaun. Omar, he… well, I had to come back. Met a Firelight, she showed me this place, and… well, they needed a doctor. Quit my job, sold my house, moved here with my daughter. My wife had died a few months earlier, and my son…”

Jem shrugs it off, going to the closet in the bathroom and pulling out the extra blankets. She looks cold, probably doesn’t know where they are... “Well, Nilah and I both wanted to come here, so we did. She’s about a year older than you.”

“What happened to him?” Jinx asks, voice quiet. The unexpected sound almost makes Jem jump. “Omar?”

“He died.” Jem says slowly, folding another one of the blankets. “Shot. You can see him on the memorial wall.”

When she looks up, Jinx's head is pressed into the window and her shoulders are shaking, eyes squeezed shut.

“I killed him, didn't I?” Jinx whispers. “I shot him.”

Jem tries to figure out how to answer in a way that keeps her from spiraling.

“You pulled the trigger, yes.” Jem says cautiously. “But you weren't in your right mind.”

“I remember.” Jinx says, squeezing her eyes shut. “I remember killing him. I remember all the people on the wall.”

“Honey, it wasn’t your fault.” Jem sighs, walking over and sitting next to her feet. “You weren't in control.”

“I remember watching him fall. I wanted to know how his muscles did that. It felt like shooting a doll.”

Jem tries to breathe.

“Silco,” she whispers, tears welling in her eyes, “killed Omar. He took him away.”

“But I killed him.” Jinx says, hitting her head on the glass, hard enough that it must hurt as tears start falling and she visibly clenches her jaw. “He died because I pulled the trigger.”

“You were a child. He died three years ago. You would’ve been barely fourteen. You weren’t the one who put the gun in your hand or the drugs in the tea. It wasn’t really you. If it weren’t for Silco-”

“I’m sorry.” Jinx chokes, hitting her head again. Jem puts her hand over the glass so she can’t do it again. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Jem’s throat is tight, but she ignores it. “It’s okay. I forgive you.”

“You shouldn’t.” Jinx cries, wrapping her arms around herself tightly and hunching like she’s trying to contain a scream. “Please, just kill me.”

“Absolutely not.” Jem says, forcing herself not to react too much. “We’re not hurting you.”

“You need to. Execute me.” Jinx cries. “Please.”

Jem takes a deep breath. “We’re not executing you.”

“Then let me do it!” Jinx snaps, still crying but with fire emerging. “I’ll fucking do it! Just- give me something! Anything! You don’t have to do anything! Just give me a gun, I’ll only use it on myself, I swear-”

“-which is why we’re not doing that.” Jem says firmly. “We’re not letting you die.”

“All I’m asking is that you just don’t do anything.” Jinx says, crumpling small again. “Just… I’ll starve. Just don’t make me eat and I’ll do it for you.”

“Honey, that’s not how this works-”

“I can’t think of another way to pay my debt except through blood.” Jinx whispers, voice choked and barely audible yet laced with this weight Jem hates being in someone so young. “I took so much, and I don’t know how to give it back. I want to give it back.”

Jem watches her carefully, forcing herself to keep breathing evenly, keep her voice steady, keep herself from reacting too much. This is fragile ground. “You can’t give it back, hon.”

“Then let me pay.” Jinx whispers. “You don’t have to do much. I’ll make it look like you didn’t mean to. Just leave a scalpel or-”

“Listen to me.” Jem says. “We’re not doing that.”

“Why not?! I couldn’t make it easi-”

“You are not beyond saving.” Jem says firmly.

“Yes, I am!” Jinx snaps. “I am! I killed them!”

“Alright. Sure. You’ve done bad things. But what happens if you did die?” Jem asks. “You built all your bombs yourself, right?”

Jinx goes catatonic again, just gazing out the window.

“You built those bombs. Did you build anything else?” Jem asks, slightly more forcefully this time.

When Jinx still doesn’t answer, Jem sighs. “The bombs were brilliant. The design. Your guns, too. All of Silco’s tech was good, even though the materials weren’t. If you made it like I think you did - if you made anything else - it wouldn’t be right to deprive the world of what you could do with that mind of yours. If nothing else, you have to stay alive to build.”

Jinx closes her eyes, a clear dismissal.

Jem sighs. “There’s food on the dresser and blankets on the cot, hon. Ekko’s coming by in about an hour to take you on a walk. Maybe take a shower and change before then? I can do your hair, if you want.”

Jinx doesn’t react.

Jem leaves her looking out the window, feeling like she’s had everything drained out of her with a syringe.

She’s gonna leave the Firelights and go to a bar for the night. She needs a damn drink.

Chapter Text

Ekko has to psych himself up before he goes in.

He feels like an idiot. He’s the leader of a rebellion group, a damn good mechanic and inventor, a good fighter, the manager of this entire base, and yet here he is, mumbling to himself and trying to work up the nerves to talk to Jinx, his brainwashed-enemy-former-friend-whatever-the-hell-she-is.

Not to mention that he actually changed his clothes and cleaned up. It’s not a damn date. She’s crazy. He’s taking her on a walk because she feels safe with him and is less likely to lose her shit (to twist Jem’s words).

Ekko sighs, slumps his shoulders, and steps inside.

She’s not on the bed where he expected her to be. Instead, she’s curled up on the windowsill, a thin blanket wrapped around her shoulders, staring out the glass below. Her hair is wet and so insanely long, spilling like neon-blue ink across the floor. She doesn’t turn when he enters.

“Hey.” Ekko says, taking another few steps closer, trying to sound casual and not like this is the most complicated social interaction he’s ever faced. “Uh… how are you doing?”

Jinx doesn’t respond. One hand rubs the leg hanging off the windowsill. Ekko winces, his gut twisting at how thin her hand is as well as how the leggings are loose. She looks way thinner than when they brought her in, and that’s saying something.

“Thought I could show you around.” Ekko says. “Plus, Jem said it’s good for blood flow and stuff.”

Jinx shifts, finally turning to look at him. He winces again at how she looks - the bruises under her eyes, while from lack of sleep, almost look as bad as when he brought her in with the double black eyes.

She’s not sleeping or eating. Generally fantastic.

Jinx doesn’t say anything. She slowly gets to her feet, favoring the one in the splint with a cringe of her own, before stopping, not doing anything else but looking down and wrapping her arms around herself. Ekko’s honestly a little impressed she’s walking, even if Jem said it’s okay and she’ll probably limp forever but especially right now.

She’s wearing the standard issue clothing Jem gives her patients - a knitted sweater, leggings, slip-on shoes (Jem says paper scrubs are inhumane) - but between her hair being down, how skeletal she looks, and how she’s just looking at the floor blankly, she looks bad.

Ekko hesitates before reaching out to touch her, and when she doesn’t protest, he carefully takes her bandaged wrist and leads her hand to the crook of his elbow.

He isn’t sure what he’s expecting. She meets his expectations exactly. Jinx’s hand adjusts slightly but doesn’t grip him, just getting slightly more comfortable.

Ekko walks slowly out the door, careful to make sure she can lean on him when her legs inevitably give out and to make sure she can keep up, but Jinx offers no comment, just staring off blankly as she limps at his side.

“Pretty great view, right?” Ekko attempts, gesturing vaguely at the vertical city with the tree smack-dab in the middle, the people milling about their lives below.

Jinx doesn’t react much. “Uh-huh.”

Ekko squeezes her hand closer to his ribs, suddenly very wary of how high the drop is.

Why did they put the suicide room-?

Never mind. He's here to make sure she doesn't jump.

“We get real sunlight here, you know.” Ekko tells her. “This place used to be an abandoned sewer, but after-”

After Benzo, Vander, Mylo, and Claggor were all killed. After Vi disappeared. After Powder joined - no, was basically abducted - by Silco.

“Well, I moved in, and somehow this started.” Ekko fumbles. “We’ve got sunlight, clean air and water, real plants-”

“Undercity has real plants.” Jinx mumbles. “Bryophytes are plants, not fungus. It just happens to have a lot of fungus too.”

Ekko blinks. He wasn’t expecting her to talk, let alone correct him. “Well, yeah. You’re right. But trees, not just moss and mushrooms.”

Jinx nods, the movement jerky and uncoordinated. She doesn’t say anything again.

It’s then that Ekko remembers there are stairs.

“Okay, I think whoever designed the layout made a bad call.” Ekko sighs. “Uh… shit.”

Jinx keeps moving, lightly tugging on his arm as she grabs the railing with her other hand and taking the first clumsy, almost-slipping step down.

“Careful, careful-” Ekko says, hurrying to get a little ahead of her, gripping her elbow with his other hand. She feels frail under his touch. He almost recoils at how little there is left of her beyond bone.

She pauses for a second before continuing to go down.

“I can get a hoverboard, bring us down-” Ekko attempts, stomping down the urge to just scoop her up and carry her the rest of the way.

Jinx gets a crease between her eyebrows for a second, but she keeps pushing forward.

Ekko tries to figure out a way to ease the way down, but Jinx is stubborn and won’t stop moving, so he gives up, just wrapping an arm around her waist to take some of the weight off her injured legs. He tries not to show how much her skinniness bothers him.

How long did Jem say it was? We have some pretty good food, maybe if I try-

Ekko snaps out of it as they slowly go down. “Anyway, it was just the tree and some of the ground-based huts you can see at first, but then it grew, and so did the Firelights. We’re about six hundred strong now. Just people who wanted-”

To get away from Silco and Shimmer.

“-to build something good.” Ekko says. “It’s all about starting over-”

“Uh-huh.” Jinx says monotonously. She’s watching their feet again.

Ekko takes a deep breath as they near the bottom of the stairs. “We’ve got everything. A clinic, kitchens, a mess hall, workshops where we build our hoverboards and tech. Pretty much everything we need to be self-sufficient.”

They reach the ground, and Ekko’s immediately feeling very… protective? Defensive?

It doesn’t matter what the name is. People are staring, pulling their children close, some gazing at Jinx with pure hostility and anger and aggression.

Ekko wants to shout at them. Silco drugged her. She wasn’t conscious for half of it. She’s only a danger to herself. She’s not evil, just broken.

He doesn’t, getting distracted by Jinx stumbling when they get off the stairs.

“Hey! You okay?” Ekko says, tightening his grip to keep her up.

She nods, hands digging into him like she’s about to fall before she manages to get up, smacking his hand off her waist with her own. “I’ve gone down stairs before, Ekko.”

“I know. I don’t want you to fall.” he says.

Jinx doesn’t react, though her fingers are tight on his bicep now and her body is shaking.

“Are you cold?” Ekko asks.

Jinx doesn’t respond for a long minute, staring off, and when Ekko follows her eyes, he sees a group of Firelights staring at her with barely-concealed terror.

Really? She can’t even walk, look at her-

“I’m fine.” Jinx says, even though she's literally shaking in fear.

Ekko exhales slowly, hesitating before putting his hand over hers on his arm. She doesn’t pull away.  “Okay. We… um, we’ve made a pretty good life here. We’ve got the six hundred fifty Firelights, but only about a hundred are fighters. The rest do their own things. Make art, tech, food - whatever they want. We’ve got about a hundred kids, too.”

“Uh-huh.” Jinx says. She’s vacant again, surfacing sporadically like skipping rocks.

“We’ve got a school for them.”

“Uh-huh.”

Ekko takes a deep breath. The goal is just to show Jinx there's life outside the safe room, not to make her talk.

“Come on. I think you'll like the workshop.” Ekko says, gently guiding her away. “There’s a lab, too.”

Jinx is still empty for a moment, but once the words process, she perks up, looking up at him. “There’s a lab?”

Ekko can't help but smile. “Yeah.”

And just like that, Jinx is alive.

She's looking around, blue eyes wide and a spark suddenly lighting. “Where? Show me.”

Ekko huffs a small laugh, surprised but relieved at the sudden shift. “It’s over there in that building.”

Even though he’s the one who got this place built, even though he’s the one who knows where everything is, Jinx drags him with surprising strength, legs awkwardly shuffling, too injured to move fast but too excited to not. Ekko lets her pull him along by his arm, but he does go in front of her as they go inside. The one Firelight inside, Rafi, sees Jinx and tenses, but Ekko gives him a look and he gets up and leaves.

Jinx doesn’t seem to care, immediately letting go of his arm to go over to a mostly-empty work table, opening and closing the drawers and pulling out metal scraps.

“Okay, guess you’re making yourself at home…” Ekko mumbles.

“Do you have any metal sheets?” Jinx asks.

“Uh… yeah, hold on.” Ekko says, going to the closet full of them. “What size?”

Jinx looks down at her arms, holding them out straight, mumbling too quietly for him to hear before saying, “Fourteen by fourteen and twenty-eight by eight.”

“How many?”

“Four fourteens and six twenty-eights.” Jinx says.

Ekko obliges, grabbing the very specific sizes and bringing them over, leaning them against the wall within reach. “What are you making?”

“Printer.” she says, grabbing one of the twenty-eights and one of the fourteens and holding them in an ‘L.’

Ekko blinks. “Printer.”

“Yup.” Jinx starts looking around, still holding it. “Where’s the soldering iron?”

Ekko hesitates. “Are you sure you should be handling that?”

Jinx looks at him blankly. “...why?”

“Jem has rules about sharp and hot things when…” Ekko gestures vaguely.

Jinx scowls. “I just wanna put it together. I’m not gonna burn myself.”

Ekko hesitates for another minute before grabbing one from a nearby table and giving it to her. “Be careful.”

“I need the…” Jinx mumbles incoherently for a second. “I need wiring, I need L-brackets, I need glass, and I need some… well, I’ll get the spools and inputs later, I need a computer…”

“Why are you building a printer?” Ekko asks, genuinely bewildered as Jinx continues muttering. “We have one-”

“I’m not printing paper. ” Jinx says, saying the word like it’s an atrocity. “I’m building my printer.”

Ekko stares at her. “What…”

Jinx sighs. “My printer, it’s… special. I made it 3D-print organic matter.”

It takes a minute to load.

“You 3D-printed organic matter.” Ekko says slowly. That’s… pretty much just an Academy pursuit. “Like… biopolymers? Resins?”

Jinx shrugs. “More like animals.”

Ekko full-on bluescreens that time. “What.”

Maybe she means lab-grown proteins or something remotely normal?

“Yeah. I got it to print bodies. I had to jumpstart animals with external stimulation at first to get them to live, and I kept mixing up their brains, but my plants were perfect.” Jinx says. “I was almost done with the neurological structure of some of them. I had one batch of crickets that were pretty close. They were pretty dumb, and they were really docile because I accidentally screwed up their memories, but they knew how to chirp and hop and live and stuff. My birds were good, but they’re a little disproportionate because I needed to make bigger brains to keep everything straight. Weirdly, bugs were harder-”

Ekko might have an aneurysm.

“You- you made living beings?” he croaks.

Jinx shrugs. “Yeah. Like I said, plants were perfect, animals were hard. Because the- the plants, I printed them, put them in the trench-”

“What trench?” Ekko chokes.

“It… so it was a bunch of planters stacked with an automatic maintenance system I built. Had about six planters, each had six plants, had piping hooked up under the dirt and attached to the next one up. The pipes, uh- the bottom ones put out arsenic and hydrogen sulfide and stuff, and the top ones misted them with river water.”

“You poisoned plants you 3D printed.” Ekko deadpans, feeling overwhelmed.

Jinx scowls at him. “No I didn’t. They were designed for it. I coded their DNA. Instead of clean air and water, they need poison and pollution and put out clean water and air. They don’t need light, just poison and dirt. If I didn’t pipe the poison in and spray them with water, they wouldn’t thrive or put out clean air.”

Ekko presses his hands into his eyes, trying to remember how to breathe.

“What the hell?” he croaks. “You- hhngh.”

Jinx scowls defensively. “It’s not stupid.”

Ekko scoffs. “Stupid? Are you kidding? That’s- holy shit, that’s insane.”

Jinx shrugs, then returns her attention to the metal. “I still need L-brackets.”

“Do you have the schematics?” Ekko asks.

Jinx’s mouth presses tightly closed for a second. “They’re at home with all my stuff.”

She dims again. “My plants, my birds and bugs, they’re- I doubt they’re alive. You need to check the maintenance system for the plants every few days, and the animals need nutrient baths and food and water and stimulation and-”

Jinx lays down the metal and puts her head in her hands in something that looks a lot like grief.

“I don’t think Sevika would feed them.” Jinx mumbles. “I can fix the skin problems from the nutrient baths and the problems from no stimulation, but- if they starved-”

“Is there any food they could’ve eaten?” Ekko asks gently, unsure how to handle this.

“No. I- I was thinking about making an automatic feeding and watering system for them too, but I liked feeding them myself and told Sevika to- if I died-”

Jinx stops, just sitting there for a long minute.

“How long can they go without food?” Ekko asks.

She sniffs. “I had a failsafe. If the cages and tanks weren’t opened in three days, I coded them to be gassed into hibernation. Should last another week. After that, they’ll die in their sleep.”

Ekko gets a horrible idea.

“We can save them.” he blurts. “If you want. We can go in and get your stuff.”

Jinx looks over at him, this absolutely disbelieving expression on her face. “You would do that?”

Ekko finds himself nodding. “Yeah. I’d do that.”

Jinx practically shoves the metal away, turning towards Ekko with her face lit up in happiness. “I- okay, you- we need to go soon. The sooner they’re out of hibernation, the better. We-”

“Come on.” Ekko says, getting up off his stool and offering his hand again. “We can talk about this over some food, okay?”

Ekko worries she’ll shut down again at the mention of food, but she doesn’t.

Instead, she takes her hand and starts mumbling rescue operation plans to herself as he leads her out to the dining area.

-

Ekko’s careful to bring Jinx to a small table in the corner, far away from everyone else, but she still seems quieter, smaller, hiding behind her hair and arm folded over her stomach. But she’s engaging, and she has a shine in her eye, and there’s food on the table, so Ekko is more than happy.

Jinx isn’t talking to him as she scribbles, mostly mumbling to herself as she scrawls tons of notes in Ekko’s notebook. Ekko’s content to just watch, eating today’s bread and soup and fruit.

After another long few minutes, Jinx closes it and pushes it back across the table. “The list of the things I want you to save, what they look like, and how to handle them. Descending order of importance.”

Ekko immediately flips to the middle, where she’d been writing, and starts reading.

MY STUFF:

Birds - Peter (plain pigeon), Theodore (plain pigeon), Burger (brown & white pigeon), Grenade (green pigeon), Pompom (pink & white pigeon), Dummy (black pigeon), Pudding (runt brown pigeon), Pirate (magpie), Chicken Nugget (warbler). Cover cages with blanket, all but Theo, Pirate, and Peter easily spooked. Don’t jostle cage. If flapping around, say names.

Bugs - crickets, glow moths, silkworms, tarantulas, butterflies, moths. Cover silkworms with blanket. If container is open and you can’t find them, leave the front door open for escape.

Computer (WITH FLASH DRIVE). Both important - computer specially built to handle flash drive (132 petabytes) and flashdrive has everything. Backup one in desk, take that one too.

3D printer - Do not disassemble or mess with except to shut cover in front. If you drop it Janna won’t save you. BE CAREFUL. DO NOT BREAK. (Bring dead magpie in tray - I want to bury it.)

Journals in bottom desk drawer - there should be six, grab all of them along with any papers in that drawer or on desktop.

Plants - get all 30. Put them in the box holding Mylo’s feet up and cover the top with blanket. When uprooting them, be careful not to break root system. Press monkey button on side of trench (would be nice to have, but I can rebuild it, so don’t bother with the setup unless extra time) to stop poison & water.

3 boxes labeled ‘DO NOT TOUCH’ & doodles opposite of desk - ignore instructions, grab and bring it to me. Don’t jostle too much. (Contains HexTech 2: Electric Boogaloo & questionable experiments (implantable microcomputer, compression-based energy unit, Blue the neural network, self-repairing metal, portable water detox unit, memory recall device, portable gravity stabilizer, prosthetics, etc).

Food canisters for birds & bugs

Box of spools for printer

Plugs for printer & computer

Stuffed rabbit (missing eye)

Blankets

Don’t bother with weapons, Silco already has my bombs, mines, & guns, so you don’t have to worry about him using them and I can make more. If anything else looks like it was built by me or like it’s alive, take it.

Ekko’s brain breaks halfway through the list.

The sheer ingenuity. The intelligence needed. How time-consuming and how difficult it would be. It’s… flat-out fucking fantastic.

“You built this.” he says incredulously, trying to keep his jaw from going slack. “You… you made all this?”

Jinx shrugs, grabbing the pudding and a spoon, the metal clinking on the glass of the pudding dish as she scoops a bite nonchalantly like it’s not the first thing she’s eaten in days. “I wanted to see if I could, and when I could, I got into it.”

Ekko wants to put his head in his hands. This is all stuff that would take the best Topsider scientists years to develop, and she’s out here doing it like it’s nothing because ‘she wanted to see if she could.’

“Tell me-” Ekko sputters. “Tell me everything, Jinx, Janna-”

Jinx shrugs again, shoving another bite of pudding into her mouth. “Want me to go down the list?”

Ekko nods, probably too fast. “S-sure. Wait, why- why would you name a pigeon Burger?”

Jinx smiles, and it’s genuine, and Ekko’s chest aches. “First day after I made him, he was just constantly following me around. Gave up, let him sit on my head, and I couldn’t get him down until I was trying to eat. He hopped down by himself and wouldn’t stop trying to take it. Ended up fighting a pigeon for a sandwich. Figured I’d name him ‘Sam’ for sandwich, but then he started insisting I hold him with one hand under him and one hand on top of him, so he became a little bird burger and it made sense.”

Ekko looks at the list. “Tell me about all of them.”

Jinx huffs a little laugh. “Pompom’s an asshole. She’s a little princess, won’t let any of the other birds near her, preens constantly. I printed her feathers to be ultra-soft, and she knows it. Bites, too. She’s the worst and nobody likes her. I messed with Grenade’s coloring, but… somehow he got… well, he’s special. Not only is he green, but when he’s really stressed out, he puffs up to twice his size and molts all at once. It’s so funny. Dummy earned his name. Same batch as Grenade with the pigmentation difference, but he’s special in a different way. He’s so stupid. I mean, I think it was my fault. I know the depth perception definitely is. He constantly flies into things and pecks away from the food. He’s really stupid. I love him so much. Dummy’s really sweet, though. Sits on my shoulders or head as long as I’ll let him and tries to follow me around and coos constantly when he’s with me.”

Jinx giggles, shaking her head and taking another bite, nodding happily to herself. “Theodore and Peter are the oldest. Some of my first living birds. They’re average - I wasn’t sure how to alter their DNA yet - but they’re both base pigeon DNA, so they’re fine. Peter’s good, just a normal pigeon, but Theodore’s a little grouch. I accidentally miswired his amygdala, so he imprinted on me super hard and needs a lot of me time to be happy. And then Pudding’s my baby. He’s Dummy’s polar opposite. Super smart, but I accidentally typo-d part of his genome, so he’s only about half the size of the others. He’s kind of shy, prefers hiding under things to actually flying around, but he’s the smartest. Figured out how to unlatch the cage from the inside. He made me redo the latch half a dozen times before I just gave up. He’s really sweet, too. He likes sitting in pockets and being held a lot, and he’ll bring me shiny things. I- shit, did I accidentally combine the magpie and pigeon files?”

Jinx zones out for a second, the last spoonful of pudding freezing midair before she shrugs and shoves it in her mouth. “Anyway, yeah. They’re weird little fluffs. I love them.”

“Files?” Ekko asks once that information slowly processes.

Jinx shrugs again, frowning at the empty pudding cup before glancing over at Ekko’s for a millisecond. He gives it to her without being asked. If pudding’s the only thing she’ll eat, he’ll figure out how to get her an infinite damn supply. “I uploaded the genomes to my computer. It’s part of why I need it instead of just the flashdrive. A petabyte is…”

She stares off for a second.

“A petabyte can store about a quadrillion bytes. I made my flashdrive hold 132 petabytes. In context, that’s… 500 billion pages? About 250 million songs? The human brain can store about 2.5 petabytes, so-”

Ekko’s brain breaks further.

“Why do you need that?” he chokes.

Jinx shovels more pudding in her mouth. “The base animal and plant DNA of ‘this is a multi-celled eukaryotic or prokaryotic organism’ takes about five petabytes of storage, and then I have about a hundred specific species, and that’s another twenty, and then two and a half goes towards Blue-”

“What’s that again?” Ekko asks.

Jinx shrinks down again, hair falling back over her face. Ekko wonders if he hit a nerve, should he not have-

“Blue was stupid.” she mutters. “I was trying to code a person.”

Ekko blinks. “What? Why?”

Jinx hugs around herself. “I… it’s stupid, but, uh- I- Sevika didn’t like me. Downright hated me, actually. Silco loved me - well, I thought he did - but he was busy. I- I didn’t talk to anyone else, really. Silco was scared people would hurt me, so I was supposed to stay in his office, my place, and the Last Drop so Chuck could keep an eye on me if I wasn’t on a job. But- I don’t know, I got kind of lonely. The voices are shitty company, the animals can’t talk…”

“...so you tried to make a friend.” Ekko says, something in his chest twinging in sadness. 

Jinx scowls at her pudding. “She just told me what I wanted to hear. Responded to data. Didn’t- didn’t actually care about me, couldn’t hold an actual engaging conversation, just told me that I was brilliant and perfect and laughed at my jokes instead of telling me I was being stupid when I was or actually feeling anything.”

She stabs the pudding with her spoon. “It’s why the animals are better. They’re not able to talk, but they get excited when they see me. Burger wants to be held like a burger. Pompom’s a bitch. Pudding brings me rocks. Dummy can’t fly through a door. They- they have personality. They’re real. Even my bugs-”

Jinx shakes her head, closing her eyes. “She’s pretty much scrapped as an artificial neural network. I’m not going to delete her, she’s still useful for projects and reminders, but- the box is the framing of what was gonna be her body when I got her working. Blue's done with that, but I figured it might be useful.”

Ekko can't help but feel pretty sad, even if Jinx's creations are fascinating.

“What… was it like with Silco?” Ekko asks slowly. “You don't have to tell me. I'm just thinking that the Powder I knew made bombs that… didn't usually work. I thought you had tutors or something, but if you were alone-”

“I didn't have tutors.” Jinx dismisses fast. “Silco gave me books and Academy papers, and I figured it out. Once I knew the basics of engineering, I could actually make my stuff work.”

Ekko nods along. “What was it like other than that?”

Jinx stares off before tapping her spoon against the glass pudding dish. “Can I have another?”

Ekko immediately gets up. “Yeah, of course.”

He’ll give her all the pudding in the world if it’ll get her to eat.

He hurries over to the serving table, piling three more puddings onto a plate before coming back. Jinx doesn’t hesitate to grab her spoon and start on another with a mumbled thanks.

She speaks between spoonfuls. “He was good. Loved me, took care of me. He really did love me, before you say anything. That- that isn’t a question. He did. I was his daughter. He was just… overprotective.”

Jinx goes quiet for a minute, eyes glassy and distant as she keeps eating the pudding. “I was allowed to go out when I was younger whenever I wanted as long as it wasn’t between midnight and six. Then, when I was… thirteen, I think, some bad shit happened. Guys started slipping stuff into my soda when I was at The Last Drop. Chuck usually caught them, but one time, he didn’t. Left me alone for a second to go get Silco, guy dragged me off. Turns out Silco killed his kid, so he used me to get Silco into a trap. Don’t remember much, but he cut me up. Put staples in me so Silco would see.”

Jinx shrugs. “It worked out fine. Sevika got me and Silco out. The guy was punished - Silco cut off his hands and stapled his eyes and mouth shut - but he said it was a bad world for a teenage girl, much less the daughter of one of the most hated men in the city. So then I wasn’t supposed to go anywhere without an escort after seven, and I was supposed to tell Silco where I was going and what I was doing. Went on my first job, screwed it up, it… well, he realized I couldn’t kill anyone unless I drank tea, so he got even more scared I would get hurt, so he had me stay in my place, The Last Drop at the bar, or in his office. If I was gonna leave, either Sevika or the twins would go with me, and I wasn’t allowed to leave their side.”

Ekko feels like his intestines are twisted wrong. It all… it just seems so off.

“And Sevika sucks and the twins were the worst, so I kinda stopped leaving. And I knew how to sneak out, so I did, but I didn’t do it often. Silco knew what was best, usually.”

Jinx finishes the pudding and moves onto her fourth. “Besides, I got my outside-time when I had jobs. Guarding the Shimmer, fighting street scum, doing whatever he thought I would be good at.”

“But you were alone.” Ekko says.

Jinx shrugs again, but she looks melancholy, face lax and sad. “It’s not a big deal, Ekko. I chose to be with Silco instead of other kids, and after he started protecting me more, I got used to staying inside.”

“You tried to build yourself a friend because you were lonely.”

“Lots of people are lonely. I had people who cared about me. That’s better than most.” Jinx mumbles, shoving a spoonful into her mouth.

But then she freezes, zoning out before hugging herself again.

“But him protecting me doesn’t make sense with the tea.” Jinx whispers, staring into nothing.

Ekko has no idea what that means.

“What tea?” he asks.

Jinx doesn’t blink, blue eyes wide and empty. “Silco made me a lot of tea. It made me act different ways depending on which tea. They were drugged. One had opioids, one had Adderall, one had Valium, other ones were mixed with drugs to make me numb and to calm me down. Jem proved it.”

And just like that, Ekko’s brain is immediately going to the worst places.

He knew Silco drugged her. He knew that. But not that many drugs, not-

“How long was he making you tea?” Ekko asks.

Jinx still doesn’t react. “First night he got me.”

Why would he do that? Would he- no, he called Jinx his daughter, besides, she was eleven, he wouldn’t have- would he?

Silco poisoned half the damn city. Tortured people. Apparently controlled and drugged Jinx to the point that she invented things nobody’s ever seen before just because she was so lonely and bored.

He was abusive to her, even if he didn’t hit her, so it’s not out of the question for him to have raped her, but-

…did he hit her? Ekko doesn’t know. He assumed he didn’t.

But if he was drugging her and isolating her and using her like that, it’s possible he hit her, it’s possible he raped her-

“Hey, Jinx?” Ekko says gently, trying to be as careful as possible. She already looks like she might shatter, but he can’t think about anything else. “Do you remember what happened during the highs from the tea?”

She doesn’t react for a really long time, eventually speaking. “...yeah, I do.”

Ekko takes as deep of breaths as he can. “Do you remember… Silco ever acting weird or doing anything while…”

Jinx slowly nods, looking almost unsure. Ekko’s going to puke.

“The lavender tea, the one Jem says must have had the Valium, it made me sick.” Jinx says slowly. “I saw things all the time, and I didn’t know where or who I was, and I acted like a little kid, and I threw up and sweated through the sheets and shit. It would last between three days and a week.”

She sniffs, putting down the spoon and pushing the tray away. “He took care of me. Only left my side for Chembaron meetings. Hold my hair back when I threw up, changed my sheets, put cold cloths on my forehead - Sevika would get mad he was taking care of me instead of Zaun.”

Ekko takes a deep breath. “Do you… remember him doing anything else while you were drugged?”

Jinx looks over at him, and her eyes narrow. “Like what?”

Ekko doesn’t answer, and he can see the moment it clicks what he’s implying.

“No.” Jinx snaps, face screwing up in disgust. “Janna, Ekko, he’s- he’s my dad! What the hell? Why would you even ask that?!”

Ekko immediately backpedals, holding his hands up in surrender. “I’m sorry.”

“He loves me.” she spits. “He wouldn’t- he wouldn’t fucking rape me, Ekko, I’m his daughter! Janna! He didn’t- he didn’t even raise his voice unless I really screwed up, that- guh, what’s wrong with you?”

“I’m sorry. It just seems… weird to me.” Ekko says. “The tea, the…” control, the isolation, the- “...protectiveness, it all seems off. I don’t understand why he would do that.”

Jinx zones out again, staring down at the table. “I don’t either.”

It’s silent for a minute, Ekko unsure of how to break it, before he realizes that there are little droplets of water on the table under Jinx’s face and her shoulders are shaking beyond being cold.

“Jinx?” Ekko asks gently.

“Why would he do that?” Jinx croaks. “Why would he lie? I would’ve taken the drugs. I would’ve gone to the Enforcers. If he had just- why wouldn’t he tell me? I trusted him. If he said I needed the drugs, I would’ve taken them. If he said I needed to die, I would have gone. But he- he betrayed me.”

Ekko doesn’t know what to tell her. That Silco’s a bastard? That he manipulated her? That he probably didn’t realize how much he fucked Jinx’s brain up and didn’t know she would have followed him willingly (that he pushed her into suicide attempts, into isolation, into losing her damn mind and being forced into a new personality and through withdrawal because he wanted to control her)?

“I don’t know, Jinx.” Ekko says softly, going to touch but hesitating. “But I know he shouldn’t have done that.”

He shouldn’t have done anything. He should’ve left Jinx behind after Vi did, where she and Ekko could’ve run away together and built this place together like they should have. Jinx wouldn’t be this broken, Ekko thinks, maybe she would still be whole, maybe, in another universe-

She presses the heel of her palm into one eye. “What am I going to do, Ekko? I can’t go back home to Silco. I can’t go to Vi. The people here hate me. I can’t- I- where do I go once Jem doesn’t think I’m gonna drop dead?”

Jinx sniffs, rubbing her eyes with the back of her bony, birdlike hand before looking at him.

She’s different. Her hair is longer, her face is more gaunt, she’s pale, she’s crying, she’s older, but he sees Powder when he looks into her blue eyes.

They’re still Powder’s. Same as the little scar on the corner of her jaw from tripping at the junkyard with Ekko is still Powder’s.

She’s not Powder, and thus, her eyes and that scar and everything about her is not Powder.

But they’re still his friend’s.

Ekko hesitates before reaching out, gently resting a hand on her back, between her shoulder blades. “Stay here.”

Jinx shakes her head, chewing on her lip and quiet for a minute. “Why? The people here - that Firelight when I first woke up - they hate me. And even if they didn’t, I’m Silco’s daughter. What am I going to do here? Be a fighter? You can’t trust I’m not gonna snap and kill all of you. Hell, when- when I was with Silco, I killed half his men because I was just shooting and I couldn’t tell who was on which side. I- look at your memorial wall, Ekko. Half of them are on there because of me. I killed your people. If you give me a gun, I probably will again. I’m crazy. I’m dangerous. And it’s better for your people if I disappear the second you let me.”

He takes a deep breath. “Have you considered it might be better for us for you to stay?”

Jinx shakes her head. “You don’t have to lie.”

“I’m not.”

“What do you even want me to do?” Jinx asks.

Ekko rubs his hand in a small circle against the knitted fabric covering her, trying to think. “I… want you to be you.”

“You won’t like me when I’m me.” she mutters.

“I’m not talking about Jinx.” Ekko pushes back, still careful to sound calm. She tenses. “Or Powder, either. Whoever you are right now. Who you’re turning into now that you’re not drugged and alone. That’s who I want on my side. The… the person who’s somehow this mastermind and stubborn and Jinx and Powder and someone new all at the same time. I just want you to be here with me.”

“Why?” Jinx asks after a minute, voice hoarse and whispering.

It takes Ekko a long time to find the answer.

“Because I’m your friend.” he says, letting go of her back to take Jinx’s hand instead. Her fingers curl around his, almost automatically. Her nail polish is almost all gone, just light touches of pink and blue left above the splints and tape. “The same reason I grabbed you on the bridge and brought you back. Because you’re my friend. And I don’t care if you’re not the same Powder I was friends with. As long as there’s even a little bit of you left, you’re my friend.”

Jinx looks at him, hair falling back into her face, eyes wide.

“You’re not just Silco’s daughter. You’re not just Jinx or Powder. You’re just… you. And that means if you want to be here, you can. If you want to leave and go wherever you want, you- you can, even if I really don’t want you to. You have a choice. You- you have a lot of choices. But… it might be okay - better - if you make those choices here. If you want to build, we’ll get you whatever you need. You can only do animals and never touch another weapon if you want. You don’t have to ever hold a gun again if you don’t want to. I’ll protect you. I’ll protect my friend. From anything. If you need me to keep you safe from the other Firelights, I will. I’ll keep everyone but the nicest like Jem away from you. If you need me to keep you away from guns forever, I will. If you need me to keep you safe from yourself or the outside world or anything in the world, I’ll do my best. Because you’re my friend. I still care. That’s not going to change, okay? You’re free, and you can make your own decisions the second you’re not going to hurt yourself, but if you stay here, I can- at least you’ll have me. You always will.”

A long time after he finishes, spent just staring at him like a puzzle, Jinx shifts towards him, chair scooting. He’s not sure what she’s going to do.

Her movements are slow, jerky, awkward, but she leans her head against his shoulder, hands twitching in her lap.

Ekko’s frozen.

It’s not uncomfortable - far from it, her head and the mass of her hair are comforting, and he feels warm and alive in a way that he knows is a flood of touch-induced brain chemicals - but unexpected. She hasn’t voluntarily been this close to him since they were kids.

“What do I need to do?” Jinx asks quietly as Ekko slowly moves his arm to be around her shoulders.

“Get better.” Ekko says gently. “I’ll get you your stuff. Just get better.”

Jinx’s arms are shaking, and they wrap around his waist, and Ekko hugs her back, careful to be gentle with her, body not sturdy or healthy enough to give her a full hug.

“Okay.” she says quietly. “I will.”

Chapter Text

Jem thinks that Ekko might be a miracle worker.

Because somehow, after about two hours of Jinx being with Ekko, she’s a different person.

When Jem comes back to the suicide-proof room, Jinx isn’t by the window like normal or even in bed. She’s changed her clothes, her purple sweater’s sleeves rolled up to her elbows, her hair (probably seven feet long and thick, Jem has no idea how her neck holds it up) tied in a massive knot so that the ends come to the back of her knees instead of dragging on the floor, her hands, despite being put back into the mittens once she was left alone on Jem’s order, wrapped around the handle of one of the dresser drawers, apparently broken-off, and she’s writing on the wall in pudding.

“...hey there, hon.” Jem says slowly, setting down the tray on the dresser top. “What are you doing?”

Jinx doesn’t react much, same as normal, continuing to write, but she’s standing. She’s doing something. “Writing.”

“I can see that. What are you writing?” Jem asks, walking over to stand behind her.

It’s then that she sees it.

They’re diagrams. Equations.

Jinx is building something.

Jem feels fear and dread twist in her stomach. Jinx designs weapons. She has to be making-

“The sun shines directly down the grate from eleven to one in the morning.” Jinx says, eyes bright in a way Jem hasn’t ever seen, switching the handle from hand to hand like she can’t sit still despite the broken fingers making it harder. “It’s not enough for solar power. It’s why your electricity is unstable. Six hundred fifty people can’t be supported by an hour of partial sunlight and an hour of solid sun per day on subpar solar panels. But when I have my stuff, I can use HexTech. The problem is that I don’t know if the runes are going to give off a signal that’ll tell anyone we’re down here. You see, the- the gems, they’re… they’re controlled by these runes. See?”

She points at a series of symbols that look like gibberish a ways down the wall. “I figured them out, mostly. When I had the gem. It’s stable, it’s good - but is it enough to support the entire base?”

Jinx crouches slowly, clearly to do with her still-healing injuries, leg still in the brace and the other still with bullet wounds, and dips it in her wrecked pudding dish before standing again, starting to scribble on the wall. “HexTech actually doesn’t support as much of Piltover as you’d think. They- they’re still reliant on factories, coal, all that- that bullshit. This needs to be the main energy source if we’re gonna have reliable electricity.”

“What about HexTech?” Jem asks slowly, brain twelve steps behind.

Jinx doesn’t complain about having to explain it.

“A few weeks ago, I got one of the HexTech gems.” Jinx says, scrawling as she talks. She looks alive. “Looking at the Topside HexTech designs, it wasn’t hard to reverse-engineer. Actually, once- once I figured out the rune system and had the gem to experiment with, I cracked it in less than a day. The original HexTech is inefficient. It’s- shit, okay. You’re a doctor and shit. You know bioluminescence, right?”

Jem nods, not fully sure of how this relates to HexTech and simultaneously being in shock that this seventeen-year-old girl made HexTech in Silco’s basement. “I do.”

“I used bioluminescence to keep my workspace lit. It’s better than lightbulbs. You see, bioluminescence-” the drawer handle’s scratching against the wall sounds like chalk as the pudding runs out again, “-is more efficient than electricity. It doesn’t produce heat, so it reserves some of the energy of a light. A lightbulb wastes a third of its energy on heat, and the electricity somehow ditches another twenty percent output along the way. So of all the energy you plug in, you only get half back in light. Bioluminescence is efficient. It doesn’t produce heat, so it keeps that third. It doesn’t have the complications of a light’s wiring, so it keeps the twenty. So, between the two, even though bioluminescence is normally dimmer, it’s way more efficient.”

Jem watches, trying to keep up with the rapid explanation, feeling something like awe creeping into her chest. This isn’t the hollow-eyed, barely-responsive, suicidal girl from four hours ago. This is someone alive, someone awake, someone present and built to create.

“HexTech like they have it in Piltover is a waste. They’re throwing away a shit ton of energy because they’re focused on the outcome. Brute force over efficiency. They’re running power through circuits and metal because they don’t care if they waste energy. They want results. They want HexGates, they want the HexCore, they’re so obsessed with what it can do that they don’t care about the biggest, most important output of the gems: pure power. They’re more concerned with how to use it than how to wrack it up.”

Jinx grins, and there’s a gleam in her eye that makes her look like a crow with a bucket of coins. “But me, my HexTech, it’s designed to be like bioluminescence. I mimicked the way organisms generate and conserve energy. While bioluminescence is chemical, by- shit, I’m messing this up.”

Jinx rubs her forehead, smearing pudding on it, the handle halting its movements. “The runes that control them, it’s- it’s based on ancient Shuriman. I think it’s part of why the Topsiders fucked it up. The dialect of ancient Shuriman, it’s- do you remember the prayer songs in the mines?”

Jem shakes her head.

Jinx huffs in frustration, leaning against one of the few non-covered spots on the walls, before raising her voice in song. Jem never dreamt she would hear such a thing from Jinx the fucking terrorist. “Bey’fet ihru ga, ahuni lek’cho, suhbi al naa yih… bey’fet ihru ga, ahuni lek’cho, suhbi al naa yih… suhbi al naa yih, suhbi al naa yih… bey’fet ihru ga, ahuni lek’cho, bey’un hahbab, ahuni lek’cho…”

Jinx looks over at Jem, and when she makes eye contact, the song cuts off abruptly. “Right. Anyway, they’re- the gems, they’re Zaunite. They’re mined here. The runes are Shuriman. They’re from our mines. The topsiders fucked it up because they aren’t from the mines. They aren’t from the Pits. They’re not from the dirt. But me, I’m from here. I heard the mining songs growing up. I know some ancient Shuriman from the songs. And that meant I could read at least a little, so I could arrange it just a little, and-”

Jinx shrugs. “It listened. I got it to refine the containment field to reduce energy bleed-off. It was exponentially more efficient. The thing is, I’m not sure how to get it to be a sustainable, reliable energy source while keeping it from giving off a signal. I don’t know if the Piltie goons track it, but the gems, they- whenever they’re activated, whether by throwing one at a wall or by powering something, they put out this wave of energy. The HexGates constantly emit pulses. It's like a flare. A beacon. If we light that baby up, it doesn't matter that it's working like bioluminescence and not wasting energy, it doesn't matter that I can get it to work like a generator, because they'll sniff us out and boom, no more miracle base in a sewer."

Jem understands in theory. However, she’s still so taken aback that the girl who’d been mindlessly loyal to Silco, to the point that she tried to kill herself when she thought he gave up on her, not only reverse-engineered something that took years to figure out for the Academy, but is now trying to figure out how to use it to help people that she just stares at her instead of nodding along like she should.

“So-” Jinx gestures vaguely to the wall. “I’m trying to figure out how to mask the signal. Like I said, I don’t even know if they’re watching for the signal, but it’s too big of a ‘what if’ to just let it go, so I’m trying to make it seem like background noise. Factory emissions, Shimmer, the plain grid system, that kind of signal, and redirect it so it looks like it’s coming from somewhere else.”

Jinx scowls at it, scrubbing some of the pudding off the wall with her mitten before starting over. “I’m trying to make a scrambler. Make it seem like nothing and throw off the location, and if anyone tries to check it out, the signal gets more jumbled and misleading the closer you get to the actual source. But the problem is, the gem is lightly radioactive.”

Jem makes a face at that, and Jinx catches it and copies the expression. “Not like that! The gem I got, it’s not bad. The raw ones, they’re radioactive and you should probably wear gloves, but the polished one I got, its radiation is contained. So it’s not poisonous or anything, it’s safe, but it’s still such a distinct signal that-”

Jinx freezes, then starts scribbling frantically. “The mines! The mines where it came from, it’s loaded with that signal, if I-”

She starts chattering incoherently (at least to Jem’s ears), handle moving faster. “I can mimic the radiation! Between the scrambler and the ambient radiation, nobody will notice shit!”

She giggles, but it doesn’t sound manic like the sound that’s haunted Firelights’ nightmares for the past few years that Silco’s Jinx has been active. It sounds happy, excited. Like a happy kid.

(To be fair, Jinx is seventeen, almost a technical adult, but Jem is fifty-three years old and thinks everyone below thirty is a baby, so-)

“I think I won’t even need anything else to scramble the signal. The masking, that’ll need some titanium and copper and a motherboard, but scrambling it - if I use the runes-”

Jinx goes to dip the handle in the pudding, and upon finding it empty, scowls. “Fuck you.” she mumbles to the dish.

Jem pulls a pencil out of her pocket, taking her notebook out and ripping out a few blank pages. “Here.”

Jinx goes to take it, then scowls at the mittens. “Can you take these off? I swear, I’m not gonna do anything.”

Jem hesitates.

On the one hand, Jinx is in here because she’s unstable. She’s been brainwashed and drugged, she’s attempted suicide twice that they know of (definitely more, but not a specific, definitive amount) and has been suicidal and wanting to hurt herself. If she has her hands completely free, she could use her fingernails to hurt herself.

On the other hand, she looks like a whole different person at this moment. Her blue eyes are wide and full of life, she’s showered, she tied her hair up as best she could without being allowed hair ties, she’s changed, she’s talking, she’s-

“If I take them off,” Jem says, “you’re going to promise me you’re not going to hurt yourself. You’re not going to try to kill yourself.”

“I’m not.”

“And if they stay off,” Jem continues, “we will be regularly checking you for any marks.”

“Sure.” Jinx says, holding them out. “I don’t care. Just take them off? I want to be able to write.”

Jem puts the papers under her arm and the pencil behind her ear, slowly reaching out and undoing the straps.

As soon as the thick fabric is loose, Jinx is all but ripping them off, and though Jem is immediately ready to jump into action to keep her from trying to gouge any part of herself, she doesn’t try, just grabbing the paper and pencil and starting to scribble in what looks like similar runes to the pudding on the walls.

“If I put these runes into effect, the signature should screw itself up. Boom, Pilties can’t find us.” Jinx says, grinning as she writes it all. Jem can’t tell if her shaking is from withdrawal or from excitement. “All I need is my HexTech and a way to distance the radiation, and bam. Electricity.”

Jem nods slowly as Jinx goes down to sit on the floor, legs splaying. “Okay. Why is this so important to you here, hon? Did Ekko say something?”

“Huh? No, he- well, yes.” Jinx rambles, leaning forward to write against the papers on the floor in something almost reminiscent of a yoga pose. “He basically just said I could stay here if I want but that I can leave too. That I can build stuff and never use a gun again if I don’t want and that he’s gonna be my friend no matter what, and that he’s gonna keep me safe. And he promised he’d get me my stuff from my lab.”

Jem sits on the floor in front of Jinx, crossing her legs beneath her. “Okay. So what are you thinking you’re going to do?”

Jinx shrugs. “Wait for Ekko to bring me my babies.”

Jem waits for an explanation.

“I, uh- I made birds.” Jinx says with a wave of her hand. “Plants, bugs. I have seven pigeons that I made from scratch and a couple other birds, and then a ton more projects and stuff, and they’re…”

Jinx goes quiet, scribbling again.

Jem blinks, processing. She made animals from scratch. Sure.

“What about the future?” Jem presses lightly. “If Ekko said you could do anything you wanted.”

Jinx doesn’t respond for a long time.

“I think I might stay here.” Jinx says slowly. “Like, this room is far away enough I don’t have to talk to anybody if I don’t want to except for you because you’re a doctor and Jamie because he’s always outside and Ekko because he’s my friend. So I can just stay here and work. Make plants and work on my HexTech and stuff. I made it because I was bored, but- if I can help-”

Jinx shrugs. “Yeah. I’ll stay here, I think. I just need my stuff and then bam, I’m good.”

“This room is for suicide watch.” Jem says lightly. 

“So?” Jinx dismisses, continuing to write.

“It’s temporary.” Jem says. “Once I think you’re safe, you’re able to leave. You’re supposed to.”

Her shoulders tighten a little bit, then continues to write. “Fine. I go to a different room and stay there with my projects.”

Jem tries to take a deep breath.

Jinx is making progress. She’s seeming less suicidal, she’s speaking, she’s working, she’s considering the future-

But she’s planning to lock herself up. Isolate herself.

“Do you want to be alone?” Jem asks, keeping her voice light, effortless.

Jinx shrugs again. “Yeah.”

“Why?”

She looks up at her, face scrunched in annoyance. “I’m really good at it.”

Jem settles a bit more comfortably. “Do you want to finish writing and then talk about it?”

Jinx doesn’t respond for a long time, continuing to write, and when the pencil starts just doodling, Jem sighs. “Are you stalling?”

Jinx smiles awkwardly. “Maybe.”

She looks like an awkward teenager. She looks the most like a normal teenage girl than she has since she arrived.

“For someone so smart, you’re pretty bad at hiding what you’re thinking.” Jem says gently.

Jinx huffs. “I don’t care if you know I’m stalling. You can’t make me do anything. I don’t have to tell you anything if I don’t want to.”

“That’s true. I’m just wondering about why you wouldn’t want to meet anyone new.” Jem says. Jinx doodles absently. She continues talking. “My daughter Nilah, she’s eighteen, so about your age, and that girl loves to talk. She gets excited whenever anyone new comes in, wants to be friends with everybody-”

“Good for her. I’m not.” Jinx glares at her writing. “Just because I’m here-”

“I’m not saying you should be Nilah, I’m saying people like Nilah might actually like to meet you and talk to you.” Jem says. “I think she’d think you were neat.”

“Did you forget about Omar?” Jinx says, going still. “Did you forget that I killed her brother? Your son? Do you really think everyone will actually like me when I’ve killed people they love? You think Nilah’s all friendly and nice, but then she looks at me and sees the person who killed Omar and she hates me. And I can’t blame her.”

“So you’re never going to talk to anyone.” Jem sighs.

“I’ll talk to Ekko and you.” Jinx says. “But I’m happy with my work.”

Jem sighs. “Have you ever had friends?”

The graphite grinds hard against the paper. “I had family and Ekko.”

“But no fr-”

“I had my parents and sister until I was six.” Jinx all but spits. “Then they die, I have an adoptive father, two brothers, my sister, and Ekko. I kill my adoptive dad and brothers when I’m eleven, Silco takes me in, I don’t talk to anyone but him and Sevika and his guys.”

Jem takes a deep breath.

She wouldn’t be surprised if Silco kept her in isolation. He was drugging her, abusing her, even if not in a typical way, and keeping a child alone would increase her dependence.

“Being alone from eleven to seventeen is a long time.” Jem says gently. “Did you feel lonely?”

Jinx scoffs, smacking the pencil down. “I don’t want to talk anymore.”

Dammit. She just pushed her back into her shell.

Jem’ll try again later. Give Jinx more time to calm down.

“Okay.” Jem says. “I’ll leave you alone. You can keep the mittens off if you don’t hurt yourself.”

Jinx doesn’t answer, glaring into nothingness.

“But,” Jem sighs, “dinner is in-”

She’ll schedule a special meal. Ekko and maybe one or two others, a slow introduction, just like planned.

“-five hours.” Jem finishes. (The main meal is in six hours tonight, but Jinx doesn’t need to know that.) “Can I get you to come down?”

Jinx scowls. “No.”

“How about Ekko?” she negotiates.

Jinx hesitates.

It’s only a bit more convincing before Jinx concedes to a single dinner.

Jem leaves with the knowledge that yes, Ekko is a miracle worker, as well as the task of figuring out some people to be Jinx’s first introduction to Firelight society.

Chapter Text

That night, Jinx feels like such a fucking idiot as she sits there with Ekko and Jem getting ready for dinner.

It shouldn’t be that stressful. It really shouldn’t. Two people shouldn’t be sitting there trying to help Jinx get ready to go to a common dinner, let alone some random doctor and her friend (which she’s still not over - Ekko still cares about her and swears he’ll continue to, which means someone cares about her and not just what she can build, he’s her friend and swears he’ll stay that way, meaning even if she fucks up he’ll still care and and and-) trying and failing to coax her into it as well as giving the mission briefing summary of what’s going on.

“Jinx, I swear, it’s not gonna be bad-” Ekko sighs.

“You don’t know that.” Jinx calls, muffled underneath the thick layer of eight blankets wrapped around her entire upper body.

“Honey, it’s only six other people-”

“I’m not leaving!” Jinx calls, attempting to wriggle onto her side in defiance, but she’s wrapped up enough that she genuinely can’t, so she gives up with a huff and just burrows deeper into them.

“You said you’d come.” Ekko retorts, and oh, never mind, they’re not friends anymore, Jinx hates him forever and ever because he 100% has her on that one.

“Well, now I don’t want to!” Jinx pouts even though they physically can’t see her. “So I’m not going!”

Jem mumbles something that sounds like ‘Janna, this girl’ before sighing. “Sweetheart, they’re all really nice.”

“And I’m going, so it’s not like you don’t know anybody.” Ekko says.

Jinx decides that if they’re gonna make her go, they’re gonna deal with her brain instead of her.

“What if one of them has a knife and tries to stab me?”

“That’s… not going to happen, and even if it did, I’d stop them?” Ekko says, sounding more like a question.

“What if I’m allergic to the food and keel over and look like an idiot?”

“Jinx, you don’t have allergies.”

“What if I develop one?”

“That’s not how allergies work.” Jem sighs.

“Maybe I secretly have an allergy.”

“Jinx.”

She pouts again. “You can’t make me.”

“Jinx, please.” Ekko says, and his voice is gentle, and godsdammit-

“Who’s gonna be there?” Jinx chokes out after she finally finds the willpower to ask.

“Five kids around your age and Ekko.” Jem says kindly. “Nilah and her friend group, mostly.”

“Oh, so-”

“They don’t hate you. Several of them have been asking about you, actually.” Jem interrupts.

“Because-”

“Not because they hate you, because they want to see what you’re like.” It’s Ekko that time, and once again, Jinx hates him. “Please come out?”

“No.” Jinx says. She still moves her arms experimentally where she’s bundled herself with them pressed against her chest. They don’t budge. Jinx thinks it’s the weighted blanket Jem got her earlier that’s keeping her there.

Well, she’s stuck.

“Also because I can’t get out.” Jinx mutters.

Ekko snorts, and Jinx can hear him approaching the bed. “You need help, Trouble?”

The old nickname makes her feel mushy. “No.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“So you just want to stay stuck in eight blankets?”

“Yup.”

“Sure about that?”

Jinx wriggles a little bit again. Still nothing.

“...fine, help me.” she sighs.

Ekko laughs a little bit. “Hold still.”

Jinx reluctantly obeys as Ekko begins to untangle her. “Janna, how did you even-”

“I’m very good at making a mess.” she informs him helpfully.

He mutters under his breath as he continues untangling. “We stay for half an hour, and if you don’t like it, we’ll come back here.”

“Ten minutes.”

“Twenty.”

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen after dinner’s eaten.”

“No.”

“Ten minutes after dinner’s done and pudding.”

Jinx will admit, that does sound pretty not-bad.

The light hits her as Ekko finishes peeling off the layers. She blinks hard, trying to get her eyes adjusted, and when she finally acclimates, Ekko’s just sitting there, looking down at her and grinning. “Hi.”

Happy bubbles rise in her chest. Yes, this feels right. This feels safe. She missed him. He’s her best friend.

She, of course, says none of her thoughts or smiles at him like she wants to.

“Well, now I’m cold.” Jinx pouts.

Ekko rolls his eyes with a small smile before shrugging off his big jacket. “Fine. Come on, we’re going to be late.”

-

“Nilah, Lin, Zeke, Davi, Ella.” Ekko tells her again as they slowly make their way down the stairs.

“Nilah, Lin, Zeke, Davi, Ella.” Jinx repeats back, watching her feet and tightening her hands on Ekko’s bicep where they’re tucked in the crook of his arm. She feels like everything’s like when they were younger - it doesn’t help that she used to process by repeating everything.

“Davi’s a tech scavenger. He’s the one with brown hair.”

“Davi’s a tech scavenger. He’s the one with brown hair.” Jinx parrots. She still feels super nervous, but she’s calming down involuntarily, Ekko’s jacket wrapped around her (and smelling like him and warm and heavy) and him at her side helping.

“Nilah is an artist. She has black and yellow hair in braids.”

“Nilah is an artist. She has black and yellow hair in braids.”

“Lin is an engineer. She has green ha- careful!”

Ekko has to catch her when her leg gives out and she starts to fall forward.

Jinx clings to him, heart pounding from the near-fall, trying to suck in a breath through her teeth as pain shoots through her legs. “Shit! Stairs are- hngh- fucking stupid!”

“We’re gonna move you to a different room soon. We can make sure it’s on a lower platform, okay?” Ekko says, supporting what must be most of her weight. “Do you need me to carry you?”

“Oh, please. Don’t you remember when we were kids and you couldn’t even carry half the scrap metal we got from the junk heap?” Jinx teases, trying to take a deep breath.

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not a scrawny ten-year-old anymore, and you weigh, like, eighty pounds soaking wet.” Ekko tells her. “I could carry you easily. Remember how I actually did when you were, you know, dying and I got you back here?”

Jinx sticks her tongue out at him even as everything in her is now screaming that she’s going to fall as they resume going down the stairs. “That wasn’t fun. I was having a bad time.”

“Yeah, well, in my defense, you were trying to kick me while your whole body was pretty much just broken and you had your knee and hip both dislocated and your other leg had bullet wounds.” Ekko says, smiling slightly. “Speaking of, how are you feeling?”

Jinx debates lying.

“Better.” she admits. “I still want the t- drugs. Like my skin is too small without them. And I feel sick and everything kinda hurts, but it’s like my brain is working better. Like, I- my brain isn’t constantly trying to update.”

Ekko taps their heads together as he continues helping her down. “Good. I think the withdrawal should take about a month, according to Jem, and then you’ll be back to normal and she’ll stop the methadone and everything. So you only have about two weeks left before the symptoms taper to nothing. It’s still better than when you were in the coma.”

“Why?” Jinx asks, unable to resist.

Ekko’s small smile disappears. “First seventy-two hours of withdrawal from hardcore drugs plus a crazy amount of injuries. You’re lucky you don’t remember. You were screaming and crying a lot even though you weren’t awake. Plus the seizures and heart palpitations and respiratory distress and fever and all that. Thought you were gonna die, Trouble. Of course, I thought it was just the pain and how thin you were at the time, I didn't know, but…”

Jinx immediately feels guilt curl around her. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. Better that you’re getting better.” Ekko dismisses. “Lin is an engineer with green hair.”

Jinx doesn’t repeat him, too consumed by what she must’ve put Ekko through. She’s a jinx even when she’s asleep. He had to listen to her scream and wait for her to die.

Maybe she shouldn't stay. Maybe she should just wait for them to move her to that other room and then run, gather up her things as soon as Ekko brings them to her and leave. Maybe get on one of the airships out of the Twin Cities, go to- shit, maybe Ionia? Her dad was half Ionian, she knows a little of the language. Or maybe she just shouldn’t run, should just go to Piltover and let them kill her-

“Hey. Trouble. Come back.” Ekko says, gently bumping her with his hip. “You okay?”

Jinx blinks, and bam, the spiral stops, disappearing again.

“I got lost.” she says after a minute of trying to think of how to explain it.

“Okay.” Ekko says simply, putting his hand over hers. “Stay here with me, okay?”

“Okay.” Jinx says, and Janna, she missed him. “I will.”

Ekko continues telling her about the people she’s going to meet, but Jinx doesn’t fully listen.

She wishes she did as her feet stop without her permission at the bottom of the staircase, her entire body locking up upon seeing the people sitting under the tree about fifty feet away, talking and laughing.

“I can’t do this.” she says, breath finally resuming but much shallower and faster. “Ekko, I can’t do this.”

“Hey, it’s okay.” he says, squeezing her hand, but her vision is tunneling and tears are pricking her eyes and and and-

Ekko pulls away, and that makes Jinx panic more, but after a second, there are warm hands on her shoulders instead, able to be felt even through the jacket and sweater she’s wearing, and Ekko’s forehead is pressed to her own.

“I got you. Deep breaths. It’s gonna be fine.” Ekko says, thumbs rubbing circles on her collarbones. “In… out… in… out…”

Jinx tries to mimic his steady, even breaths, but her chest won’t let her, body automatically deciding that right now is a really good time to cry and have a panic attack. “I- I can’t-”

“I’m right here with you. We’re in the Firelight Base. It’s you and me and you’re safe.” Ekko says. “Nobody’s going to hurt you at all.”

Jinx hates the tears that have randomly started streaming down her face, and she’s grateful she’s not wearing makeup so it can’t smear.

“You don’t have to.” Ekko says, voice quiet and soft. “We can leave and try again later. I can’t imagine how terrifying this is.”

“I- I want to-” Jinx gasps, and her breath rattles like rocks in her chest. “I- I need to-”

He rubs his hands up and down her arms, and she breaks, pulling away before practically diving into his shoulder and hugging him tight, trying not to shake too badly.

Ekko wraps his arms around her without hesitation, one hand on the back of her head. “It’s okay.”

It’s a solid few minutes of hyperventilating and crying into Ekko’s shoulder before she’s able to pull back, and even then, her legs are super shaky, knees practically knocking together. Ekko’s hands immediately frame her face.

“The second you want to go, we can leave.” Ekko says firmly. “It doesn’t matter if it’s five minutes or an hour. What we said earlier doesn’t matter. If you want to leave, we leave.”

Jinx manages to nod.

“Okay.” he says, thumbs lingering on her cheekbones for a second before he returns to her side instead, arm around her shoulders and practically holding her up. “You’re fine.”

She almost goes to tell him it’s not fine that she used to be able to kill people while giggling and now she’s sitting here having panic attacks over meeting a new person, but then that reminds her that she used to kill people while giggling and she freezes up again, thoughts drifting to the memorial wall.

She’s a murderer. She’s a monster. She’s-

“Trouble. Stay with me.” he murmurs softly, squeezing her shoulder with his hand as they slowly start walking again. “Focus on me.”

Jinx nods jerkily. “Focus on you.”

She does, making a point to play with the strings on the inside of Ekko’s sleeve when they approach the table. None of the four (Jinx thought there were five-?) notice until they’re sitting down, at which point all eyes turn on them.

“Sorry we’re late. Stairs are rough and Tr- Jinx was just telling me about some things she built and we got distracted.” Ekko lies smoothly, hand hovering over her back as Jinx settles in the padded wooden chair like he’s worried she’ll fall.

She’s glad he’s lying for her.

“Yeah, it’s no problem.” a girl with dark skin, pale green eyes, and braids with bleached locks braided in with the black says, smiling at Jinx and revealing shiny white teeth unusual for the Undercity. “I’m Nilah. It’s nice to meet you.”

She moves fast, arm jerking up, and Jinx flinches away - she killed this girl’s brother, she has a gun - but she’s just offering her hand to shake.

Jinx stares at it for a second, trying to process, but Nilah’s smile doesn’t fade, and after a minute, she takes it, shaking once before shoving her hands under the table.

“Sorry.” Jinx mumbles. “I- uh- not used to this.”

“You’re fine. We know it’s your first time talking to people other than my mom and our brave leader over there since landing in the infirmary.”

“I’m Lin.” a different girl says. Her hair is green, short and spiked on top, and her eyes are blue. She doesn’t try to shake Jinx’s hand. She’s glad. “Thought you’d be… different.”

Jinx shrinks, and Ekko flashes a look over her head, but Lin just shrugs. “I’m just saying, you hear all these stories about the infamous Jinx, and I kinda built you up in my mind to be, like, six foot and built like a tank and menacing and shit, but you’re tiny. Like, you look like you could be blown over by a small breeze and like you’re more hair than person.”

Jinx scowls. “I’m not tiny. Five-one is an acceptable height and seventy pounds is an acceptable weight. And my hair is long ‘cause I haven’t cut it since I was eight. It’s shorter when it’s braided.”

“Seventy-” Lin starts, expression scrunching into something Jinx doesn’t recognize.

“So what does everyone do?” Ekko interrupts. “Jinx isn’t familiar with everything going on here.”

“Oh! Right.” Nilah smiles. “I’m an artist. Ekko and I painted most of the memorial wall together. Anything painted, I do that. Anything clothing or looks, I make that. I made the sweater and leggings you’re wearing, actually. If you want anything new, I could take care of that for you. Makeover.”

“I don’t think I need a makeover.” Jinx says honestly, smoothing her shaking hands down the front of her sweater. “I like sweaters. They’re warm.”

“Glad you like my work.” Nilah smiles. “But seriously, if you ever want anything painted or anything to do with looks, come to me, yeah?” 

“I’m Lin, I’m one of the engineers here. I design most of the weapons.” Lin says flatly. “Some of your stuff was pretty good.”

Ekko makes a hissing noise at her through his teeth, but Jinx can’t resist the temptation.

“The weapons are nothing.” she says, hunching in on herself in case any of them want to throw anything at her after remembering who she is. “The bombs and guns were cool, but the- my thing isn’t mechanical engineering, it’s biomechanical engineering.”

“Like prosthetics?” a boy with black dreads and light pink eyes (a former Shimmer addict?) asks. “Zeke, I work in the kitchen- did you make prosthetics?”

“Uh- yeah. And n-new limbs.” Jinx stammers, a little nervous at all of their eyes on her. “I- I was working on making new organic limbs, I j-just- had more trouble synthesizing it as seamlessly as it needed to be. The- there were issues with putting them on and having everything connect. I could make- uh, I could make limbs with flesh and stuff, but stitching it on without printing it onto the stump, because th- that was too time-consuming, because a human l-limb, it would be about five days of sitting still, it’s- uh- organs you can just transplant, but a l-limb-”

She cuts off, realizing she’s probably not doing the whole talking thing right. “I- sorry.”

“You-” Zeke says, staring at her with his jaw slack. She must’ve really fucked it up- “You- you made new organic limbs? You created flesh-and-bone limbs that were theoretically compatible?”

Jinx pulls the jacket tighter. “Y-yeah?”

Lin puts her hand over her mouth, staring off into space.

“So you’ve- you’ve created almost-compatible limbs?” Zeke repeats.

“They would all be completely compatible.” Jinx admits. “Theoretically. I- I tested it on some rats I caught. I take a teaspoon of blood, my- I plugged it into my computer and printer and it read the antibodies and blood type and printed a compatible limb, you- you wouldn’t need immunosuppressants, the- the problem was just that it didn’t plug into the stump right.”

“Printer?” the last girl asks, half her purple hair shaved and tattoos covering her skin on the other side of her head. “The- like a paper printer?”

“No! No, no, the- it’s my printer.” Jinx stammers.

Ekko places a gentle hand between her shoulder blades. “Jinx made a 3D printer that prints out organic material instead of plastic.”

They all keep staring at her, jaws slack, and Jinx gives up and just grabs the collar of Ekko’s jacket and pulls it up so she can tuck it under her chin and wrap her head up so they can’t look at her.

They think she’s crazy. They think she’s a monster. They think-

“No- no, they’re impressed, it’s okay. It’s okay. They’re trying to wrap their heads around it.” Ekko says quickly, gently trying to tug it off her head. “It’s okay, come out.”

Jinx lets him succeed after a second in the dark, and when she comes out, it looks like the exact same scene she left. She wants to hide.

“The- the nervous system worked?” Lin finally chokes out. 

“The only problems I- I’ve made is that I can’t- small brains are hard to print and I- the organic material takes time to finish printing and be fully cooked.” Jinx gets out. “If I can speed up the process and print it directly onto the stump of the limb, it would be almost seamless. Just a- the thing is, making the- the layers of bone and muscle and skin and veins and nerves and everything, it- a finger would take a day.”

They’re all still staring at her.

“You made brains.” Nilah says. “You- what?”

“Well, I- I can’t make animals without them.” Jinx says, smiling awkwardly. “The birds were okay, but the- the bugs, they had- they had bugs. Get it? The bugs had bugs?”

Lin drops facedown on the table and makes a very odd noise.

“You made living animals?” Zeke asks. 

And yes, Jinx knows this one. She likes this one.

“Yeah! I- they needed to be jumpstarted when they were printed, but it always worked and I could get them alive.” Jinx says. “The plants didn’t need jumpstarting. They were alive from the second I printed them, but the- the animals needed a little help. But it’s okay! They’re all really good. I have nine birds and another I was printing before I left and about two hundred bugs. They’re all unique.”

“Did you design them after existing species?” Nilah asks.

“I did! The birds are mostly pigeons I played with the genes on plus a magpie and a songbird - I was gonna print them friends, I swear - and then I have crickets and spiders and butterflies and moths and silkworms and stuff.”

They’re staring at Jinx again, but she feels warm and happy inside, so she doesn’t hide. “Do you want to hear about my birds?”

None of them react for a second.

Ekko leans over and taps his forehead against the side of her head above her ear before pulling back and grinning at her.

“I’m gonna tell you about my birds.” Jinx says, shifting in her chair. “So I started with two pigeons, Theo and Peter, two years ago. They’re genetically identical because I had only just written out the code-”

“Code?” Zeke asks, and that’s when Jinx realizes they’re hanging off every word. She wants to spin something or flap her hands.

“Yeah! Code! I coded the printer, but then it needed instructions, so I plugged in the ACGT bases for both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, then I took that and slowly stepped up! So I went from cells to base animal DNA then base bird DNA, then pigeon, then I modified it! Like- my pigeon Grenade, I made him extra fluffy, and then I modified his DNA so he would have dark green feathers, and then I- don’t ask me how I did this, but I did, and when he’s startled or scared, he molts all at once. Like boo, then bam, pile of feathers.”

Jinx gives up and starts flapping her hands up-and-down by her chest. “Ekko said he’s gonna get my birds for me. And he’s gonna get my computer and printer and all my stuff and bring it here. Do any of you want a bird? I can make a bird for you.”

“You can print birds.” Lin mumbles from where she’s still laying on the table. “And limbs.”

“And organs.” Jinx says. “The organs are really good. There aren’t nerves and the body already knows what to do so all I have to do is print it and pop it in and bam, it works. I have to start the heart and lungs manually by pumping them with my hands but livers and kidneys and everything, they’re easy. They need the blood sample again, though.”

“My mom- well- my other mom, not Jem, she- she died because Piltover wouldn’t put a Zaunite on the organ transplant list.” Nilah says, staring at Jinx. “Do you have any idea how many people you could save? Zaunites don’t get organs, they don’t get prosthetics, and you- you could give them working bodies again.”

Jinx blinks, trying to process, hands falling into her lap.

Ekko pulls out his notebook and puts it on the table in front of her. “Trouble, you want to tell them about your other stuff?”

Jinx blinks again and looks down at the page it’s open to.

MY STUFF:

Birds - Peter (plain pigeon), Theodore (plain pigeon), Burger (brown & white pigeon), Grenade (green pigeon), Pompom (pink & white pigeon), Dummy (black pigeon), Pudding (runt brown pigeon), Pirate (magpie), Chicken Nugget (songbird). Cover cages with blanket, all but Theo, Pirate, and Peter easily spooked. Don’t jostle cage. If flapping around, say names.

Bugs - crickets, glow moths, silkworms, tarantulas, butterflies, moths. Cover silkworms with blanket. If container is open and you can’t find them, leave the front door open for escape.

Computer (WITH FLASH DRIVE). Both important - computer specially built to handle flash drive (132 petabytes) and flashdrive has everything. Backup one in desk, take that one too.

3D printer - Do not disassemble or mess with except to shut cover in front. If you drop it Janna won’t save you. BE CAREFUL. DO NOT BREAK.

Journals in bottom desk drawer - there should be six, grab all of them along with any papers in that drawer or on desktop.

Plants - get all 30. Put them in the box holding Mylo’s feet up and cover the top with blanket. When uprooting them, be careful not to break root system. Press monkey button on side of trench (would be nice to have, but I can rebuild it, so don’t bother with the setup unless extra time) to stop poison & water.

3 boxes labeled ‘DO NOT TOUCH’ & doodles opposite of desk - ignore instructions, grab and bring it to me. Don’t jostle too much. (Contains HexTech 2: Electric Boogaloo & questionable experiments (implantable microcomputer, compression-based energy unit, Blue the neural network, self-repairing metal, portable water detox unit, memory recall device, portable gravity stabilizer, prosthetics, etc).

Food canisters for birds & bugs

Box of spools for printer

Plugs for printer & computer

Stuffed rabbit (missing eye)

Blankets

Don’t bother with weapons, Silco already has my bombs, mines, & guns, so you don’t have to worry about him using them and I can make more. If anything else looks like it was built by me or like it’s alive, take it.

And then-

Ekko’s handwriting.

'‘Trench’ planter system - get if possible

If any extra organic stuff like body parts or animals, steal’

“Oh. Well, I- on top of my animals, I- I had a computer I built with a flash drive that has 132 petabytes. That’s- the- Piltover’s national library only has twenty petabytes and the human brain has 2.5. And I- I put a neural network on it, too. Her name is Blue. She’s- she’s an AI assistant. I coded her to be my friend, but she didn’t work very well, so she’s just my assistant. And then I reverse-engineered HexTech and I fixed it so it’s more efficient. I’m gonna turn it into an energy source.”

Lin’s head is in her hands, Nilah’s eyes are fixed on the table and her hand is over her mouth, and Zeke is sitting there kicking his feet with his chin on his palm, watching her with bright eyes.

“Plus I made plants.” Jinx says. “They absorb poison. They take in arsenic and factory emissions and carbon monoxide and toxic water and put out clean air and water. And then I built them a little house. I call it the Trench, it- it monitors them and gives them whatever they need. I have sixteen species. And then I also made a water purifier. It’s kinda big, about fifty pounds, but it can make any water clean.”

“I’m gonna go get Davi and the soup.” Zeke says, slowly standing up and grinning at her like she’s the damn sun. “Stay right there. Do not move. I- holy shit, I need to know everything.”

Jinx nods slowly as he walks away. She wasn’t expecting this. She was expecting to be yelled at, them wanting her dead, them-

“You’ve fucking- you’ve fucking- you made HexTech electricity that was more efficient, you made a water purifier, you made fucking terraforming plants-” Lin chokes. “You 3D printed organs and body parts and animals, you- you’ve- do you understand you basically just singlehandedly created a way to make a utopia?”

Jinx shrinks. “I wanted to see if I could.”

“I’m going to fucking kill myself.” Lin chokes. “What the fuck?”

“Well, that’s why I’m in the suicide watch part of the infirmary.” Jinx tries to joke. “Your mom doesn’t let me have scissors anymore, Nilah. Turns out you'll get in trouble if you stab yourself.”

And all of them go insanely quiet, and Jinx realizes that oh, that probably wasn’t funny. 

“It wasn’t even that bad, either.” Jinx tries to salvage. “You wouldn’t guess it, but I was crazy shaky so I missed.”

Still not funny. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“Did you know no number below a thousand has an A in its name?” Jinx asks, an awkward smile bubbling up even though she wants to run.

“I thought you were in that room because you wouldn’t eat.” Nilah says quietly, looking on the verge of tears.

“Oh- uh, no, that- that came after.” Jinx says, shifting awkwardly. “And it’s not that big of a deal, I- I’ve tried about thirty times for real and, like, a couple hundred more times that weren’t really tries like trying to get myself shot on a job, but- uh, yeah.”

The silence gets worse, wrapping around Jinx’s throat like a vice, and Ekko’s hand goes stiff on her back.

“I-” Jinx stutters, and fuck, this is why she shouldn’t have come down- “Did you know that the smallest bone in the human body is the stapes bone?”

The silence grows thicker, more suffocating, and Jinx wants to melt into the floor or perhaps burst into flames. She tries again. “It’s- it’s in your ear. It’s shaped like a stirrup. That’s why they call it that.”

“How many-” Nilah whispers. “I’m sorry, how many times?”

Jinx shrinks into Ekko’s jacket. “I- a lot. But- that’s why they call me Jinx, you know? I- I have really bad luck so it never worked. I even cursed myself.”

She bleats an uncomfortable laugh, but their amazement has shifted, and now Nilah’s looking at her in horror with her hand clasped over her mouth and Lin looks absolutely shaken and-

“I’m sorry.” Jinx whispers. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

“Why would you do that?” Nilah asks, hand shaky.

“Yeah, we- we kinda figured you were a little crazy but still-” Lin says.

Jinx shrinks, and she glances over at Ekko, and he looks shattered, but he still nods a little.

“No.” Jinx says quietly, wrapping her arms around herself. “I, uh- I wasn’t- Silco, he loved me, but- not right, I think. He- he had me on drugs. He put drugs in tea and had me drink it. And there was chamomile tea that knocked me out and mint tea that made me super fast and elderberry that calmed me down, and then the- the bad ones were lavender tea that made me really sick and the- green tea would make me feel like nothing was real. The- the- when the green tea would wear off and I would get sick, that- that- that was when most of that happened, it was because- I- I would feel like everything was real again and I would realize I was alone and my- I’d killed people, and- I would think that I didn’t deserve to live, so-”

Jinx cuts off. “Sorry, I- I’m rambling.”

All of them are staring at her in horror, but Ekko rubs her back for a second. “It’s okay. Keep going if you want.”

“So you didn’t want to?” Nilah whispers. “You didn’t… you tried to kill yourself because you weren’t in control when you killed them?”

Jinx shifts. “I was… kinda in control.”

It takes a second to gather her thoughts enough to talk. “I- on my first job, I- I was supposed to shoot someone through the head, and I- I didn’t want to, so I wouldn’t, and so I went home and S-Silco gave me green tea for the first time and took me on a job the next day. He- he held my hands and we pulled the trigger together and he explained that n-nothing was real so I wasn’t hurting anyone. And it was kinda confusing at first but, uh- then I- it started feeling fine. Like shooting toys. And I- I laughed a lot during the fights and everything because I- I thought it wasn’t real. But then I- sometimes I’d wake up if I hadn’t had enough of the tea and I’d realize it wasn’t real so I’d try to blow myself up or shoot myself or slit my wrists and stuff. Sevika, uh, she started having people outside my door. I used to beg her not to tell Silco when she caught me.”

Jinx bleats another laugh, scrubbing her eyes with the sleeves of her jacket.

“Silco abused you.” Nilah says quietly. “Holy shit.”

“No, he didn’t.” Jinx immediately defends. “Silco loved me.”

They don’t say anything to that for a long minute, Ekko rubbing her back again.

“Is that part of why you’re… not great at socialization?” Lin asks. “Like, no offense, gotta respect the autism, but you… seem rusty.”

Jinx shrinks even further. “I didn’t think it was that bad.”

“No, you’re fine.” Nilah says, tilting her head back and fanning her eyes for a second before looking back at Jinx. “Sorry, I was about to ruin my eyeliner, and I worked too hard on that.”

“Respect.” the purple-haired girl nods, speaking again for the first time in a while. “Sorry, I’m Ella.”

Jinx nods a little bit at her, still feeling too awkward and shaky.

“Trouble, it’s okay.” Ekko says gently. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want.”

Jinx blinks. “Talk about what?”

Ekko makes a general expression that she doesn’t quite read before she remembers what she told him the other day.

“Oh.” Jinx mumbles. “I- um, when I was thirteen, people started being creepy towards me and slipping stuff into my soda and shit, and I got kidnapped and a guy was stapling me at one point, so Silco kinda freaked out, and I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere without an escort after seven and I had to tell him where I was going and what I was doing, and then Silco realized I needed to drink the tea to hurt anyone so I wasn’t allowed to leave my place and his place and the Last Drop and I had to have bodyguards and none of them let me talk to anyone.”

Jinx shrugs. “So I, uh, I kinda didn’t talk to anyone but Sevika, who hated me, and Silco, who was busy, for… three years, three and a half years? Before, I was allowed to talk to people, but I kinda didn’t, so it’s more like six years. But I was allowed to until I was fourteen!”

“So you were isolated for six years.” Ella says, voice quiet. “That… that’s a long time to be alone.”

“I had Silco and Sevika and my animals.” Jinx mumbles. “It wasn’t bad.”

“Wait. You made all this stuff… while drugged and isolated and- you’re from the Lanes, so you didn’t have any formal education, right?” Lin asks.

Jinx nods. “I- I didn’t. And I- shit, wait. I made all the stuff and I didn’t have any formal education. There. But I read a lot. Silco got me all sorts of Academy papers and textbooks, and then when I was twelve I hacked into the Academy library and had access to, like, everything.”

“That’s amazing. So you code beyond the genetics?” Ella asks.

Jinx can’t help but perk up. “I do! I taught myself. I can use Python and Java. C++ and HTML, no, but-”

“Soup time!” Zeke beams, coming back with his arms full of balanced dishes. “Here you go! Onion and leek soup with fried onion toppings and fresh bread.”

A slightly-cracked bowl is placed in front of Jinx, and the smell-

It brings her back to being a little kid, holy shit.

Jinx’s appetite suddenly snaps back into place, and her mouth is watering so much she’s practically drooling as she gazes longingly at it, but she’s not sure if it’s okay for her to start eating yet.

She’s zoned out and focused on the food enough that, when someone sits down on the other side of her with a smack of a plate and a whistle, she jumps.

“So you’re Jinx?” he says, smiling at her and looking her up and down. “What’s up, I’m Davi.”

Davi seems like a scavenger. He looks roughed-up, his clothes patchy and mildly grimy in spots, and Jinx has the feeling he thinks he’s the best thing in the world based on his crooked, cocky smile and obviously-carefully-styled brown hair. 

He offers his hand, and after a second, Jinx extracts her own hand to where they’ve migrated to under her thighs to shake it. He holds on a second long.

“I heard you made real living beings? And bits of living beings?” Davi says.

Jinx nods jerkily. “I- I did.”

She wants to talk about her birds and bugs, of course, but the soup smells really good, and so she turns away from Davi to Ekko. “Can I eat?”

Ekko smiles at her. “Yeah, go ahead. There’s always more if you need it, too.”

Jinx ignores literally everything else, including a mildly-miffed-looking Davi, as she scoops up some of the soup and puts it in her mouth.

Ho-ly shit.

It doesn’t taste like Vander’s onion-and-leek soup - his had more pepper and more water - but it tastes like home, and Jinx’s body takes that moment to decide that it’s gonna catch up on God-knows-how-long of not being hungry, and she fucking inhales it, stuffing bread into her mouth and practically moaning at how good it is.

“Slow down, it’s not going anywhere-” Ekko laughs, patting her back when she chokes a little on a chunk of bread.

She does slow down marginally, but she still is all but licking the bowl by the time the others are halfway through.

“I’m gonna take that one as a compliment, Blue.” Zeke grins as she stares longingly at Ekko’s still-half-full bowl. “I’ll get you more in a sec, okay?”

“Really?” Jinx asks, and she can’t help but smile back. “You made this, right?”

“I did!” Zeke beams. “It’s a relatively common food in the Lanes, but I added a few extra herbs.”

“I think I could eat this every day for the rest of my life.” Jinx says genuinely.

Ekko huffs in an approximation of a laugh. “Or you might be hungry. In the past week, you’ve eaten four puddings and now this, Trouble.”

The table gets quiet again, and gods- dammit, between her making suicide jokes that land very very very wrong and her and Ekko accidentally dropping facts that make everyone sad, apparently, maybe her and Ekko should just stop talking.

“Here.” Davi says, pushing his bowl over to her. “You look like you could use it.”

Jinx scowls, even as she takes it without a second thought. “I’m a respectable height and weight.”

She ignores the laughter as she starts chowing down on Davi’s food too.

“I’ll send you home with some leftovers, yeah?” Zeke laughs. “Nothing like eating soup like a goblin in the dark in the middle of the night.”

Jinx nods, because she might think the phrasing is weird, but...?

Jinx eats three bowls of soup, four pieces of bread, and is feeling un-empty for the first time in ages by the time the pudding comes out. It’s chocolate and drizzled in caramel, and it’s fucking delicious, and Jinx devours that too. She leaves with a full belly, the jacket wrapped as tightly around her as Ekko’s arm, a container of soup, and the promises of help with her projects (Lin, Davi, and Ella), extra snacks (Zeke), help with her room or a makeover (Nilah), and a hangout whenever she wants (all of them).

Still, even though she feels happy, she’s glad Ekko’s helping her back to her room, because everything’s tired and she wants to go to bed.

Jinx pauses halfway up the stairs, and Ekko turns to her, clearly concerned, but she just leans into him, pressing her forehead against his collarbone.

“You’re my favorite,” Jinx offers in way of explanation, and it’s true, ‘cause Silco used to be her favorite, but that’s different from how much she cares about Ekko, because this doesn’t feel like it comes with conditions. And Ekko feels like he cares about her in a new way, one that feels safe and home in a new way.

“You’re my favorite too.” Ekko says, voice slightly rough. “I missed you, Trouble.”

Jinx’s insides turn to jelly, and she hugs him, and it’s a solid minute before she’s willing to let go of her friend (she! Has! A! Friend! Woo!) and go to bed in a room that suddenly feels so empty that she feels empty and then she cries for no reason at all.

Chapter Text

The next morning, Ekko checks to make sure that Jinx’s room is mostly set up before taking Zeke, Lin, Nilah, Ella, and Jamie to go raid Jinx’s lab and bring everything back.

To be honest, he’s being a little too exact with everything, but to be fair, Jinx is important. She needs her stuff, she needs a safe place, she needs people she knows to handle her stuff-

So yes, Ekko brought people Jinx has met and seems to like to raid her lab and assigned them specific jobs. (Zeke is in charge of the printer and computer, Jamie is in charge of the ‘DO NOT TOUCH’ boxes, Ella’s got the blankets and the smaller stuff like the food canisters for the animals and blankets and chargers and flashdrives and such, Nilah’s in charge of the bugs and birds, and Ekko’s got the plants and papers and journals.) Yes, he’s made a precise plan down to the minute to get in and out in under eight minutes while keeping all of the stuff safe. Yes, he and Nilah set up Jinx’s room last night after she went to bed.

Ekko’s actually kind of excited to show it to her today after they get back. 

The room is on the second-lowest landing of the stairs, door opening out onto the platform, glass but with a curtain and a lock (which Jinx will have the key to as well as Ekko and Jem) so that it’s escapable yet secure, open but able to hide if she wants. There are two windows - more than normal - with heavy blue curtains that Jinx can keep open or shut. The layout is similar to most of the other bedrooms - hells, almost identical to Ekko’s - with a cushioned platform carved out of the wood of the walls about five feet up with a small staircase leading up, already with extra blankets and pillows on the mattress. There are shelves for her bugs and experiments and belongings, space for the Trench Planter Two-Point-Oh and bird cages, and a huge workbench that Ekko made sure had everything she’d need (though he did have to fight Jem to have welding materials in a former-suicide-watch patient’s room, compromising with the fact that he lives in the room right below hers and he’ll hear if anything is going on.)

Nilah was almost as obsessive as he was about it, to be honest. She’s the one who filled Jinx’s dresser with so many sweaters that the drawer almost didn’t close, the one who went through muttering about blankets as she sorted through her own fabric stores. Still, between their efforts, it’s safe and comfortable and he’s 98.5% sure that Jinx is gonna like it, and he knows she’s gonna be thrilled to get her birds back.

So yeah, today’s gonna be a good day.

If they can get through the raid without getting caught.

Ekko thinks it might be the fact that she’s just learned that Jinx was drugged and isolated for years and pretty much forced into the violence and is actually just a strange, brilliant, depressed person who’s attempted to take her own life at least thirty times (what the actual fuck , by the way, the thought makes his chest hurt), but Nilah’s obviously forgiven her for the last resentment she had left over Omar, now making plans to be her friend.

Which the others were talking about most of the way over. From the bits Ekko got when he wasn’t busy setting the path through the Undercity while avoiding Enforcers and Silco’s guys (still combing the streets like there’s no tomorrow - Ekko’s just praying that they stay out of Firelight territory until he’s figured out how to fake Jinx’s death in a way that won’t have Silco waging a whole war), they’ve come to the conclusion that Jinx is an ‘absolute mad scientist’ and autistic (Lin’s 99% sure, while Zeke’s theory is just trauma) but cool and invited into their little friend group.

Ekko can’t say much about their group, honestly. He’s… not usually a social person outside of his leader duties. The second he doesn’t have to meet with his people to make sure that nobody’s gonna die and they have enough food and water and energy and safety and such, he’s off to hide in the workshop and hope nobody comes to get him or go strategize in his room and ignore people.

He does get along with Jem (for Janna’s sake, she’s the reason he has dreadlocks instead of just a mess on top of his head), and he’s thus friends with Nilah, but the others… well, he talks to them sometimes, but he’s definitely not part of their group. He’s always the outsider.

Even though he’s the leader of the Firelights, he hasn’t been part of a group since he was eleven years old and Mylo and Claggor died, Vi went missing, and Powder was kidnapped and assumed dead until she showed up and started killing their people three years later.

Janna, that was six years ago.

Jinx has only been back as his friend for a few days and only been living with the Fireflies for two and a half weeks, but he’s been less alone than he has been in a long time. Is that sad?

…He can feel lonely later. What’s more important right now is executing a full heist from a Chem-baron and insane revolution leader to steal his missing daughter’s futuristic inventions and birds from under his house and nose.

-

Sevika had thought that the moment she hated Silco most had already passed.

When Silco had first brought Jinx home, Sevika had put up with the tea. The little sumprat could probably use some medication, constantly crying and screaming and throwing a fit until Silco slipped pills into her tea.

In her defense, she’d thought they were mild sedatives. She didn’t realize what, exactly, was in the tea until she saw Jinx start withdrawal for the first time, at which point she went into his tea cabinet under the pretense of making her a cup and looked at what, exactly, the pills were.

She immediately knew why Jinx was getting sick. She immediately knew why the kid still looked so small even though she was thirteen. She immediately questioned Silco’s wisdom.

Sevika, of course, didn’t bring it up. She wasn’t about to get fired or killed over criticizing Silco’s parenting. Besides, as long as she could get Jinx to eat and put some semblance of meat on her bones and as long as Silco wasn’t putting her in any real danger, it was fine. Sevika wouldn’t interfere.

And then Silco gave her Valium for the first time.

The girl was coming into her own. She was relatively good at combat, even though she was a baby whenever it came to actually causing damage or killing, and she built things that, even to Sevika, were impressive. She was a little taller than she used to be, a little less bony, and even though she was dependent on the drugs and clingy to Silco, she was growing up.

And then Silco drugged her with a dose of it, and when Sevika came into Jinx’s room for the first time since she’d had her psychotic episode, she found the girl asleep in her bed with Silco waiting on her, practically a child again.

The situation had made Sevika feel slightly ill, but it was nothing compared to later.

The first time Jinx had taken the Valium, it made sense. She’d tried to shoot things that weren’t there. She’d tried to shoot herself, putting the gun to her head until Sevika wrenched it away, smacked her for even thinking about it, and shoved it in her own pocket before going to Silco to let him know that Jinx was off the deep end. While it didn’t seem like the best idea, Jinx was calm.

The second time, Jinx had been normal. Silco had done it for no reason.

Sevika had been looking for him. There was a Chembaron meeting coming up. After a while searching, she’d finally gone to ask Jinx if she knew where he was, but-

She’d never forget. Silco was sitting at her bedside in her childhood bedroom, fingers carding through her hair. Jinx was wearing a white nightgown, her hair out of its braids and spread across her pillows, and she was completely unresponsive.

“Look at her.” Silco had said, voice almost awed. “She’s so beautiful, isn’t she? She looks so peaceful. Like Sleeping Beauty. My perfect little girl.”

Sevika didn’t think she looked like one of the princesses in the universal bedtime stories. She thought Jinx looked like she had cancer. Like she was straight out of a Shimmer or heroin den in the Pits.

Jinx looked sick. She was too thin, her dark circles too deep and her face too gaunt and her whole body far too shaky, and Sevika wanted to tell him that she didn’t look like fucking Sleeping Beauty, she looked like a fourteen-year-old girl with a terminal illness, but she didn’t dare.

After that, Jinx constantly looked sick.

Silco was piping increasingly higher doses of the drugs into her, twice the ground-up pills four or five more times a day. Jinx refused to eat. She refused to sleep. She was so thin that even Sevika started pulling her punches when she was teaching Jinx how to handle close-range combat, so unwell that even Sevika stopped smacking her quite as hard upside the head or on the cheek when she wasn’t listening or doing something fucking stupid like slitting her wrists and leaving Sevika to find her hunched over the side of her bathtub with crimson everywhere.

Sevika wouldn’t forget the first time that happened, either. She’d gone to make sure the little shit had eaten in the past few days, and she hadn’t been able to find her until she looked in the bathroom and found the thirteen-year-old girl with a razor in her hand and gashes from her palms to her elbows and tears streaming down her face as she lay against the tub and waited to die.

“You fucking idiot!” Sevika had snarled, slapping her hard even as she started pressing on the wounds, even as she’d been holding back tears and rage. “You stupid little girl! Do you really think this is a good idea?! Are you fucking kidding?!”

“I’m sorry,” Jinx had whispered, somehow both looking empty and having tears streaming down her face. “I’m s’rry, don’t tell him.”

And Sevika had wanted to. Janna, she wanted to march Jinx up to his office and tell him to look at the ugly wounds splitting her bone-thin arms in half and tell him to stop. But she didn’t. All he would do was give her more Valium so he could ‘take care of her.’

She hated him more with each time. Every time she barely managed to wrench the gun away from Jinx in time, every time she had to cut the rope stringing Jinx from the ceiling or wrap her wounds from her fingernails or knives or keep her monitored so she wouldn’t jump off the edge of her workshop into the pit below. She hated Silco more with each time Jinx almost won and almost died.

She didn’t ever tell him.

She stopped trying to discuss the effects of the drugs, too. After Jinx's third seizure, this one lasting three minutes and scaring the shit out of Sevika, she'd gone to him asking about what was doing it. He told her it wasn't her business and she'd regret it if she asked again. He lowered the doses slightly, but didn't take her off.

When Jinx was fifteen, Silco had called her into Jinx’s room. He looked awful, exhausted and frazzled, and he’d told her he was falling asleep and couldn’t leave her alone.

He’d overdosed her. He’d overestimated her weight, assuming she was a healthy teenage girl instead of the waifish little monster she was, and given her nearly double what she should’ve had of something close to heroin and opioids and knockout drugs, and she’d already stopped breathing twice.

So Sevika had taken up post at the girl’s bedside, and when she stopped breathing again and Sevika had to use both the nose spray and the syringe into her thigh because she didn’t start again for too long, she hated him so much that she considered wrapping Jinx up in her comforter and carrying her away, using her contacts and savings and history to get them out. She thought about working as a mercenary again, maybe in Ionia, far away, getting them new identities, raising Jinx as a niece, cutting and dying her distinctive hair, forcing her through withdrawal and letting her build her genetics projects and all the insane shit she managed to figure out.

But if she stole away his daughter, Silco wouldn't rest until he found them. He'd take Jinx back and pump the drugs back into her, and with how her tolerance would drop after withdrawal, it would kill her. He would have Sevika tortured and murdered for taking her. They would both die and suffer for it. The only way that Sevika could even try to keep their heads above water without trapping themselves in a cave at low tide was to stay where she was and tread water, try to hold them both up as best she could.

So Sevika didn’t take her. She just kept dosing her with the naloxone until the drugs were out of her system, at which point Silco administered another dose of them to keep the withdrawal from starting.

Sevika thought that would be the time she hated him the most.

But then he sent Jinx to be tortured.

Sevika’s seen some shit. She has nightmares every night. She’s always managed to sleep anyway.

Until almost three weeks ago, when they’d held her down and forced her to watch as they ripped her apart.

Sevika regretted every single cruel word she’d ever said to the little girl who used to follow her around and try to be her friend until Sevika succeeded in making her think she hated her and she left her alone, she regretted smacking her upside the head when the girl went into danger or refused to eat or sleep and slapping her when she would try again and again to kill herself, she regretted ignoring her seventeenth birthday a week before, she regretted not taking her and running far away, she regretted not ever making that little girl think anyone but Silco could ever love her, not telling her that she was loved and there was life outside Silco and she was something, that she was loved, that she was so, so loved-

Because she was tied down and beaten and forced to watch as Jinx’s hip and knee were dislocated, as they kicked her in the face and beat her with a brick, as she had her nose and fingers and ribs broken, as they nearly forced her to aspirate, as they even started burying her alive-

For nothing. All for nothing. Jinx didn’t know anything about any other terrorists. She only talked to Silco and Sevika. She didn’t leave home except for jobs. She was seventeen years old, still a child, and screaming so much that her vocal cord popped audibly, even across the bridge. And it didn't matter how much she screamed that Jinx was a child, that she didn't know anything, to leave her alone, those fucking Enforcers wouldn't.

They were going to kill her by the time the Firelights showed up.

They killed the Enforcers that were ripping Jinx apart, shot the ones holding Sevika down and ripping off her prosthetic, but Sevika was still so fucking scared as the leader pulled a gun.

Sevika was begging. Sevika, who'd survived years in an industry of violence and bloodshed as the one in control, was screaming for them to leave the kid alone.

They had started unburying her where the fucking Enforcer had slammed bricks over her lower half, and they'd started to free her, and Sevika prayed for the first time in years as she frantically untied herself as best she could with one arm, but-

The leader picked her up and took off, even when Jinx screamed from the movement, and Sevika was hardly to her feet by the time the only traces of Jinx were dead bodies and rubble and blood and vomit.

And she'd stumbled home, regretting every time she shoved Jinx out of her bed when she tried to crawl in after a nightmare, every time she ignored one of Jinx's drawings as a kid, every time she turned a request for a hug into a shove, thinking Silco had the resources to rain fucking hell and get her back.

Only for him to tell her it was negotiated. Jinx for Zaun.

Sevika lost her shit and broke his face.

He didn't know they would hurt her. Thought they would temporarily detain her safely and then return her. He was horrified, started a search, was panicking as he shouted orders through a broken nose.

Sevika didn’t look. The way Jinx was treated, if the Firelights didn't get a doctor…

She holed up in Jinx's hideout and waited. She listened to the reports (nothing on Jinx and everything to do with the celebration of the terrorist’s death in Piltover (the Enforcers lied and said they had to shoot her - Sevika wanted to burn it all to the fucking ground with every firework because Jinx was a fucking kid and they tortured her almost to death)) . She took care of Jinx’s birds and creepy little insects, following the exact process she’d seen the girl do a hundred times of their feedings and nutrient baths (the birds started warming up to her, though Sevika sat down and pretended not to cry when the birds were all cooing and chirping in a way that felt like they were asking after their creator). She slept and ate when she could bear it and waited and waited and waited, because if Jinx were going to come back, it would be here, and Sevika would be here.

If Jinx walked through the door, Sevika would catch her. She would take care of her, she would take care of her wounds, she would apologize for everything and be kind to the girl like she should’ve been all along, she would make her eat and she would block the drugs and the second Jinx was well enough, Sevika would take her and run far, far away where Jinx could be safe and get better from whatever the insects did to her after what the Enforcers did.

So Sevika can’t leave this room. She won’t until she’s radioed that Jinx is somewhere else.

Because Janna, if that little girl walks through that door, Sevika can’t not be here waiting.

And that’s why, when Silco calls her to his office, it breaks her fucking heart to leave.

-

“You all know your roles, right?” Ekko whispers as he passes the lock panel’s cover to Jamie’s waiting hands, pulling out his backup pocket knife and sawing through the green and yellow wires exactly how Jinx said to do it.

“Printer and computer.” Jamie murmurs.

“Living things.”

“Boxes labeled ‘do not touch.’”

“We got it, boss-man, chill out.” Ella dismisses with a wave of her hand instead of actually answering.

Ekko has to grit his teeth to not snap at her.

He wants to be back in the hideout. He wants to not be here with them. Lin is a good engineer, which he likes. Jamie is cooperative and a man of few words, which Ekko appreciates. Nilah is kind, same as Zeke. Ella is none of the above. She’s belligerent, only listens to instructions and requests when it suits her, and while Ekko respects the medic-in-training, she also drives him nuts.

(To be fair, less than Davi does, what, who said that-)

But that doesn’t matter. They’re on a really compressed time-table, and they have to get in and out fast. They can talk about heist behavior later.

Upon the green wire snapping with a spark, the door slams open, making Ekko jump.

“Wait here-” he whispers, unsure if Silco’s men are in there, but-

Ella passes him and Jamie (who Ekko has theories about him liking her) follows, and Ekko wants to lay facedown in some nice dirt. “Guys!”

They all ignore him. Ella walks in like she owns the place, Jamie following her with that calm of his, Nilah flashing Ekko a sympathetic smile before going in as well and Zeke shrugging before following.

Ekko exhales through his nose. At least none of them are dead (yet). That’s a plus.

He ducks inside last, clicking the door shut behind him as quietly as he can.

It’s not what he expected.

From Jinx’s description of what her place would look like after weeks of her absence, Ekko’s prepared for dust, a dead bird in the printer, the birds in the cage hibernating and their skin rotting from no nutrient baths and starving and the insects half-missing and half-dead, the place to be dirty and yet still, something preserved.

It’s not.

The birdcage, a metal thing that must be four feet tall and three feet wide with a little separate turret on top (Ekko’s ignoring how cute that is), is full of life and movement. The little turret has a tiny leaf warbler hopping around on the perch and chirping, the seven pigeons and two magpies inside all cawing and cooing.

Jinx said there was only one magpie. That the other was still printing, and since she wouldn’t be there to jumpstart and care for it, there would just be a dead body in the printer tray.

Someone else has been taking care of this place. The whole lab is tidier than Jinx would have left it knowing her, there’s no dust, everything’s in pristine condition-

“Hurry.” Ekko whispers, suddenly hyper-aware that someone else has been there.

Everyone, luckily, is on it. Ella’s wandering around grabbing all the chargers, taking the flash drives from Jinx’s workbench drawers and her smaller affects, Zeke’s carefully shutting the tray of the printer and strapping it up, readying bungee cords to get it on his back, and Nilah’s happily making a beeline towards the birdcage.

“Oh, hello-” Nilah coos at the cage. “Ekko, look at these!”

Ekko is, and Janna, Jinx is amazing. Even from across the room, Ekko can see which bird - real, living birds she printed - is which: the fat brown-and-white pigeon that’s cooing loudly, the one half the size that must be Pudding, black and brown and green and white birds, all hopping around and flapping their wings and clearly agitated but so very alive.

A regular Frankenstein. Making living birds and insects and plants from spools of proteins and collagen and keratin and tissues, from little feeder jars of cell mixes.

“We can be amazed later.” Ekko whispers. “Someone’s been here. We need to move.”

Thankfully, they listen that time. The printer is strapped onto Zeke’s back, and Nilah uses the extra bungee cord to strap the bird cage onto her own back, whispering to the birds in a baby voice.

Ekko goes over to the plants, having to remind himself to not be amazed as he sees the species of plants that she designed, some glowing, some neon, some not, but all of them pulsing (whether life or poison, Ekko doesn’t know), pressing the monkey head button.

“Oh, of course she has spiders.” Nilah hisses. “Oh, ew, ew, tarantulas-”

“Just grab them!” Ekko hisses as he hurries to the desk, opening and closing the drawers as he searches for the journals. He finds them fast, and he quickly starts shoving them into his backpack.

“Ekko, it’s as big as my hand, ew-”

“Grab! The! Jar!”

Nilah continues making ‘ew’ noises as she goes through, collecting the jars and small terrariums, packing them into one of the empty boxes they brought. She saves the terrarium with the three tarantulas for last, each of the spiders curled up in the glass the size of Ekko’s palm. One of them twitches as it gets stacked inside, two legs raising and trembling, tips brushing the glass. Nilah groans and shudders.

“You’re the one who wanted to grab the living things!” Ekko hisses. “Do you have all of them?”

“Working on it!”

“Got the computer!” Zeke calls.

“Working on it!” Ella shouts.

“What the hell are in here?” Jamie says in disbelief as he looks at the scrawled labels on the ‘DO NOT TOUCH’ boxes. “‘Portable gravity stabili-’ she built a portable gravity stabilizer? Are these prosthetics?! HexTech 2: Electric Boogaloo- the fuck? Compression-based energy unit, imp- what the fuck is an implantable microcomputer? Self-re- self-repairing metal?!”

“The metal’s buggy. It breaks easy, even if it grows back. Can you balance all the boxes the whole way back?” Ekko asks, searching for the blueprints. He’s got her drawings and journals, where-?

“What’s even her IQ?” Nilah calls back as she carefully covers the box with a blanket and trying to throw a blanket back over the cage.

“Dunno. She’s just brilliant. We have four minutes.” Ekko says, rifling through the other side of her workbench, and bingo, they’re rolled up in the top drawer-

“I’ll get my mom to administer one. Like, I bet it’s crazy high. What’s everyone’s guess?” Nilah asks. “Like, what number?”

“Higher than yours if you don’t move faster.” Ekko mumbles.

“I’m gonna bet that it’s really smart. Like, one-fifty.” Nilah says.

“She reverse-engineered HexTech, genetically engineered how to print living animals with a modified 3D printer, and makes organs and limbs like they’re chocolate-chip cookies. Be serious.” Zeke says. “One-seventy at least.”

“Did you see her at dinner? Did you see how bad she was at talking to everyone? She couldn’t get a sentence out.” Ella says, shoving every loose object she can find into her bag. “I think she’s smart but the lack of social skills knocks her IQ down a little. One-sixty.”

“Genius doesn’t mean socially fantastic. And she used to be way better before, you know, she was kept in isolation since she was eleven years old and drugged to the gills.” Ekko snaps as he desperately tries to fit it all in. “Hurry up!”

“We’re working on it! And seriously, Ekko’s right on the socialization thing. Being alone during the whole teenage developmental years thing? That’ll screw you up. Really isn’t a surprise that she’s a little off. Betting on 180s or up. She’s, like, the max IQ. Whatever that is.” Jamie tells him.

Ekko rolls his eyes. “Start getting out. This place has someone else taking care of it. Jinx wasn’t the last one in here.”

And as if the universe decides to fuck him over just because he said that, something slams into his head.

Ekko sees stars for a second before he comes to his senses, yanking his owl mask down and ducking, whipping around and pulling a knife.

“You!” Sevika shouts, trying to bring her metal hand down on him again. “You fucker!”

Ekko shifts his weight fast, kicking at her knee and scrambling back. “GO, GO, GO!”

Sevika looks up, and if she looked angry before, oh, shit, she looks like she’s about to set them on fire.

“GRAVE ROBBERS!” she all but howls, setting her sights on Nilah and barreling towards her. “IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO TAKE HER, YOU HAVE TO TAKE HER THINGS?!”

Ekko lunges with his knife, and the tiny blade doesn’t do much against the powerhouse with the bionic arm that is Sevika, but it does make her stop and turn back towards him for a millisecond, which is enough for Nilah to open the door and run out at top speed. “DON’T TAKE HER FUCKING BIRDS!”

Ekko tries to stab at her, and when that doesn’t work, he just wraps his arms around her waist where she’s turned her back to go after Nilah to drag her back. She tries to elbow him in the face, but the mask protects his nose.

Sevika’s sloppier than Ekko remembers from her when she worked for Vander or when she worked for Silco and wound up fighting the Firelights a few times.

“I’M GONNA FUCKING KILL YOU!” Sevika howls. “GIVE IT BACK! IT’S HERS! YOU CAN’T TAKE HER BIRDS!”

She starts fighting again, but she’s fucking bad at it, and-

“IT WASN’T ENOUGH TO HURT JINX, YOU HAVE TO KILL HER ANIMALS?!”

The words finally sink in. It all processes.

Sevika must think Jinx is dead.

It’s why the workshop is so maintained and the animals are so taken care of. It’s why she’s fighting so poorly and carelessly. It’s why she sounds so desperate.

Sevika thinks Jinx is dead.

“GET THE PLANTS!” he shouts instead, and Ella shoves her bag to her back and hauls up the entire trencher system into her arms.

“SHE WAS A KID!” Sevika screams, voice cracking. “SHE WAS A KID! I’M GONNA RIP YOU APART!”

She finally manages to hit him, elbowing Ekko in the throat, and he staggers back, wheezing, barely managing to trip her with his foot when she starts forward again.

Sevika whips back towards him again, teeth bared and tears in her eyes, and Ekko makes a bad choice.

He yanks the owl mask up, showing his face.

“It’s me!” he shouts. “Ekko! Do you think I’d kill her?! Do you think I’d kill Powder?!”

Sevika goes stone-still, staring at him.

“I wouldn’t hurt her!”

And he needs to stop. He needs to stop. They’re faking her death.

“We did everything we could.” Ekko says, eyes flicking to Ella as she slips out for a millisecond before going back to Sevika. All that’s left is the papers and books and blueprints in his bag. They have everything else.

Sevika still looks dangerous, but she’s not moving. Ekko slowly rises to a crouch, balancing on the balls of his feet. “We tried to save her. We couldn’t.”

Ekko feels bad for the pain in her eyes, but shit, Jinx being alive can’t possibly get back to Silco. He’s already combing every inch of the Undercity. If his second-in-command knows-

“The internal bleeding, we had gotten her stabilized. But the- the drug withdrawal.” Ekko bullshits. Sevika looks like she’s in agony. “Her body couldn’t make it. Her- it set the bleeding off again. She died. I’m sorry. We tried.”

Sevika’s chest is rising and falling rapidly, but the rest of her is still except for her eyes, blinking fast. After a long second, she backs up, leaning against the workbench with most of her weight. She squeezes her eyes shut. “She’s dead?”

“I’m sorry.” Ekko says quietly, even though it’s a lie.

Sevika just sits there breathing for a long second.

“Where’s her body?” Sevika croaks. “Where’s her- where?”

“In our base. It was… it has trees and vegetation and… it was a nice place.” Ekko says. “She’s buried.”

The tears that rise in his eyes are real, because if they’d been a few minutes later when she stabbed herself with the surgical scissors or Jem had been even a tiny bit less skilled as a surgeon, Jinx really would be buried in a grave with moss and grass covering the mound and a wooden headstone and whatever trinkets Ekko could find to lay on her grave. She would be cold and rotting and dead instead of alive and relatively okay and currently asleep in the room designed to keep her safe from herself.

“She’s taken care of and safe.” Ekko says, voice cracking, and that’s not a lie. “She’s in a good place. But she’s not coming back, and I’m sorry.”

It’s the truth, even if he’s implying something different.

“I’m so sorry, Sevika.”

“Why-” she whispers, voice cracking. “Why would you steal her things?”

Ekko slowly stands up, looking at the floor and nodding, and Sevika’s watching him and waiting for an answer with tears in her eyes.

She’s lost in enough grief that she doesn’t notice how Ekko’s just out of reach.

He’s faster than her.

Ekko lunges to the side and starts sprinting, and he manages to make it out to his hoverboard and take off with just her agonized, grief-stricken scream behind him.

Chapter Text

Jinx sleeps in the morning after she cries herself to sleep for the first time in ages.

She’s not sure what time it is when she finally wakes up, but there’s sun coming in through the window, which means it must be between the times of eleven and four PM, when the sun is able to reach down the grate above, even if most of that time is when it's simply in the sky and not visible at all through the grate.

Which means they have electricity for a few hours. At least until one when the sun no longer is directly over the grate.

Jinx desperately needs her HexTech back. She needs to make that generator before she forgets how.

She ignores her brain in favor of wrapping her blankets tighter and rolling over onto her side, shifting as she tries to get her body to stop hurting.

It doesn’t work.

Pain definitely hasn’t been an uncommon thing throughout her life, but she thinks the Enforcers must have really fucked something up, because her hips and knees and ribs and hands and arms and literally everything just feels stabby.

Jinx rolls over again, trying to get comfortable, but it doesn’t work, so she just wraps her head in the blanket and groans, hiding in the dark for a minute before taking the blanket off and forcing herself up.

It’s so strange.

Two, three weeks ago, she felt sick. Before the Enforcers got her, she felt sick. And then after she woke up, she felt even sicker, but now, a week, a week and a half later, she feels… less sick than before. Sure, she still doesn’t feel great - everything still hurts and she still has this niggling craving in the back of her mind and she’s still shaky and she still has to take the stupid Methadone - but she feels… less like she’s dying.

Which is generally good.

Jinx needs to go and ask Jem if this is normal, because she really doesn’t feel like she should both feel relatively better and also like she’s made of broken glass.

She slowly gets up, awkwardly putting the brace on over her leggings and leaning on the wall for support as she slowly goes to walk out.

Jamie’s standing guard outside again.

“Hey.” Jinx says, voice quieter than she’s used to. “Um- hi. How are you?”

Jamie looks over at her, scarred features neutral and still for a second, before he breaks into a smile. “Got the shit scared out of me this morning, but think you’ll be happy.”

“Wh- why would I want you to be scared?” Jinx asks, a little flicker of self-hatred twisting in her. “I- that doesn’t make me happy.”

“No- no, I’m not saying you’re happy because I was scared, I’m saying you’ll be happy about the reason I was scared.” he says, laughing a little through his nose. “Go find Ekko, he’ll show you. He’s crazy excited.”

Jinx’s brain is stuttering. He said the raid would be ‘soon,’ but it wouldn’t be this soon, would it?

“Did Ekko do the raid?” Jinx asks, a little bit of excitement fluttering in her chest, but she doesn’t trust that it’s true, so-

“Go check it out.” Jamie says, nodding towards the stairs. “You need help?”

Jinx doesn’t know. She hasn’t been out of the room alone.

“I dunno.” she admits.

He shrugs. “Worth a shot. Can always scoot the rest of the way down.”

Jinx looks over at the stairs, and oh, no-

“I- I don’t want to.” she stutters. “I’m gonna fall.”

Jamie leans against the outside of the suicide watch room’s wall. “You know, that’s kinda a good sign. Not wanting to fall down the stairs and all.”

Huh.

“I think it might be because I already feel like I got hit by a sledgehammer.” Jinx dismisses, ignoring the fact that he’s right because in this moment she doesn’t want to die. “Don’t wanna make it worse.”

“Fair. Need help?” Jamie asks.

Jinx considers it before deciding no and taking the first step, leaning hard against the wall.

“Alright. Bye to you too.” Jamie says from behind her. “Have fun.”

Jinx doesn’t respond, even though she probably should, instead slowly taking the stairs one-by-one.

She’s about halfway down when she almost collides with Ekko.

“Sorry! Sorry-” he starts, going past her, and Jinx watches in confusion as he keeps going up before screeching to a stop, turning around to look at her looking like he’s been sucking on a lemon, and walking down the stairs with his head hung.

“I am so sorry.” he sighs, arms limp as he looks ashamed beside her. “I didn’t recognize you.”

“I- uh- how?” Jinx asks, gesturing vaguely to her hair and face. “I’m… not easy to miss, I think. I mean, the hair-”

“You’re not. I, uh- I was too excited to show you something and wasn’t thinking.” Ekko coughs, scratching the back of his head awkwardly. “Sorry.”

“What were you so excited to show me?” Jinx asks, the excitement resuming its fluttering alongside the amusement and confusion and warmth that she’s feeling. “Did you do the raid?”

And bam, apparently she turned Ekko’s brain back on, because just like that, he’s grinning and looking so excited that he’s practically vibrating, which is so out-of-character for the calm, relatively-collected, mildly-grouchy-but-mostly-coolly-cheerful person he’s become that Jinx is thrown off. “Come on! You have to see first.”

Jinx realizes Ekko looks pretty likely to just start bounding down the stairs without her, so when he turns away, she quickly shoves her hand into his elbow, gripping his shirt tightly. She wonders where his jacket is for a minute before she remembers that it’s currently in her bed.

…does she really have to give that back?

He puts his hand over hers, pausing to let her catch up before resuming their pattern of the awkward limp-step down the stairs. Jinx’s whole chest is fluttering in that excitement still, but she feels warm and happy too, and even warmer when she realizes how much bigger Ekko’s hand is than hers.

He’s only a few inches taller than her, maybe three or four (in Jinx’s defense, she was apparently on drugs, so she probably could be taller, they’re only seventeen so they’re probably still growing, and she knows for a fact that she’s more flexible than him - her leg twinges, so maybe not anymore, but she used to be more flexible), which is weird because she used to be taller up to when they were eleven, but- anyway, his hand is massive compared to hers.

“Wait- wait, put your-” Jinx says, holding her hand up.

His smile turns slightly confused, eyebrows furrowing slightly, but he obliges, holding his hand up to hers. Their palms press together. His hands are warm.

Ekko’s hands are indeed much bigger than hers. Where her fingers are thin and shaky and lined with old cuts and burns that never fully disappeared, his are long and thick and steady and calloused. His palm is about one and a half times as big as hers, and his fingertips extend far above hers.

They used to look the same - grubby, small, always stained with oil and dirt and whatever they managed to get into.

“Huh.” Jinx says, staring at the difference. “Your hands got way bigger.”

“And yours are still perfect for precision work.” Ekko says, smiling at her.

“They would be if I didn’t shake.” she corrects.

His smile dims slightly. “Further out you get from your last dose, the less you should shake, I think. But anyway! I gotta show you!”

Ekko starts walking again, and Jinx wraps her fingers around his hand instead of letting go to hang on his elbow, and he freezes for a second before continuing to slowly go down the stairs, hands entwined.

When they reach the landing, Jinx perks up upon hearing the noises from the room about six doors away, but Ekko lets go of her hand to cover her eyes.

Jinx finds herself smiling so wide that her cheeks hurt. “I already know their noises, Little Man.”

“Just let me do this!” he laughs, and she can feel him bouncing slightly on his toes behind her.

She relents, letting him guide her and stopping when he says so he can go forward and open the door before leading her in. “And… open!”

His hand disappears off her eyes, and she opens them to a room that she genuinely likes.

That means absolutely nothing to the birdcage in the corner.

-

“BABIES!” Jinx shrieks at the top of her lungs, practically diving towards the cage. “MY BABIES!”

She falls in front of the cage, and Ekko panics slightly, but she seems fine after the initial gasp, splaying her legs out and practically pressing her face into the bars.

“One, two, three, four, five, six, s-” She goes quiet. “Wait, there- there are two magpies?”

“Sevika saved it.” Ekko says.

When she turns to look at him, tears are streaming down her face, but she’s smiling so wide that the corners of her eyes are crinkling in a way that Ekko’s never seen - as Powder, she was too young to have that, and as Jinx, she didn’t smile like that, only having frown lines. But right now, her eyes are crinkled, and she looks so happy that Ekko melts.

“They’re all here.” she beams, voice cracking on a happy sob. “They’re all here.”

“Your bugs and plants, too.” Ekko says, inclining his head towards the shelf with the terrariums and the Trench. “We got everything on the list.”

She slaps a hand over her mouth, laughing and sobbing in equal measure. “Ekko!”

“And this is your room, by the way.” Ekko grins. “Nilah and I put it together last night.”

Jinx staggers to her feet with jerky movements, legs clearly not working with her, before she turns, limping over to Ekko and giggling.

He’s expecting a hug, but he’s not expecting her to full-on vault at him.

Her arms latch around his neck, forcibly-straight leg shooting out past him and her other leg wrapping around his hips. Ekko staggers slightly before hugging one arm around her back and holding up her leg with his other hand, which finds its place under her thigh.

“Thankyouthankyouthankyou!” she squeals, shaking so hard that he’s almost concerned. “Ekko! Oh my Janna!”

He smiles into her shoulder. “So I take that as you’re happy?”

Jinx pulls back, and it hits him how close she is. 

She grabs his face and plants a kiss on his cheek, barely two inches from the corner of his mouth, and Ekko would be lying if his face didn’t immediately go hot and his back go impossibly straight.

Her lips against his skin doesn’t last long, maybe two seconds, before she pulls back, cold hands cradling his face in a way that’s impossibly gentle for someone who’s been the most feared girl in all the Undercity for years.

When she does pull back, she’s so, so close still. Her breath fans warm across his lips, and she’s close enough that he can see the flecks in her blue eyes and count her eyelashes, and suddenly he’s eight years old again, trying not to lose his mind because Powder’s a naturally cuddly person and decided they’re sharing a sleeping bag and clinging to him like a spider-monkey as they brush their teeth and play and go to bed.

“Ekko!” she gasps, smacking their foreheads together. “ EKKO!”

“So you- you’re happy?” he repeats, voice cracking a little.

(Oh, shit. He thought the crush he had on Powder died when she first resurfaced as Jinx (well, first resurfaced and had witnesses) right before they were turning fifteen, when she looked right through him as she fired the gun at him, as she talked to the guns like they were people, but the warm tightness in his chest- oh, shit-)

“You are the best friend everevereverever-” she chants. “Thank you! Thankyouthankyouthankyou!”

Ekko forgot how touchy Powder gets when she’s excited. (Not Powder, not Powder-)

She has to unwrap from him to get down, Ekko steadying her despite the mess his brain is quickly turning into, at which point she grabs his hand again and all but drags him over to the cage. “I have to introduce you! And- oh, I need to name the second magpie!”

Ekko follows, sitting cross-legged on the floor with her when she drops again, reaching up to fumble with the lock of the cage, fingers failing thanks to the tremors.

(Her hands really are shaky. Fuck Silco for drugging her, for making her go through withdrawal, for-)

“I got it.” Ekko says, reaching up and undoing it.

And just like that, there’s a flood of birds, all of them shooting out through the little door and practically swarming them. Ekko flinches, but they don’t even try to land on him - they all go to Jinx.

Some land on her legs, others on her arms and shoulders, one on her head - she’s beaming, immediately baby-talking at all of them, immediately so unbelievably overjoyed that Ekko feels like he’s going to combust.

“Oh, hello, baby, did you miss me- oh, look at you, you’re so fat- Burger! Burgburgburg!” Jinx practically chirps at them. She picks up one particularly fat pigeon, all fluffy brown-and-white feathers, with one hand, laying the other hand on top and pressing them together. The bird doesn’t react with distress, just closing its eyes and practically purring.

She turns to him and grins. “Here! You can hold him!”

Ekko can barely get a protest out before she plops the bird in his hands. He doesn’t really stir, simply blinking his beady eyes at him.

The brown-and-white bird is surprisingly heavy, fitting well in his palms. He’s a fluffy little thing, feathers both sleek and soft, and he simply watches him for a few seconds, maintaining awkward eye contact, before leaning forward and pecking his wrist.

“Ow!” Ekko hisses, almost dropping him.

“He wants you to hold him like a burger.” Jinx laughs, reaching out and taking his hands by the wrists. “He’s very particular. Here.”

She slowly shifts his hands, sliding the pigeon off onto one palm and pressing the other hand over the bird’s back. “Here. Squish.”

Ekko hesitantly does, not wanting to be pecked again or hurt him, but the pigeon doesn’t seem distressed - in fact, his eyes close in something that looks a lot like bliss.

“He likes you.” Jinx beams at him, and it’s hard not to smile at her with how she looks.

At the moment, there’s a large black pigeon sitting on top of her head, with two more sitting on her shoulders, three sitting on her forearms, and the tiny songbird perched on one of her splinted fingers, with one of the magpies sitting on her knee. She looks like a crazy bird lady.

The other one, though, is still in the cage, and he can see the moment Jinx realizes, turning to look at it with her features softening and a lock of blue falling in her eyes, shifting the songbird to her other hand before extending her now-free one inside.

“Hello,” Jinx says, voice soft and sweet. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you woke up. I made you.”

The magpie doesn’t budge, staring her down, and Ekko remembers that magpies are aggressive.

“Careful.” he whispers, more focused on it than the bird he’s currently compressing in his hands.

“It’s okay. I took out a lot of their aggression. The magpies are calm and don’t have hunting instincts. It was the only way I could get them to leave the pigeons alone.” Jinx says quietly, still slowly reaching for it. “It’s the same way I built the pigeons to be cleaner than cats. I needed them to have desirable traits. C’mere, pretty bird, I’m not gonna hurt you. I just want to look at you.”

Ekko watches in fascination as the bird watches Jinx warily before hopping to the side, away from her hand. It tilts its head over and over, like it’s trying to examine her from different angles.

“It’s okay. I’m nice, I promise.” Jinx soothes, slowly bringing her hand towards it again, surprisingly controlled despite the tremors still running through her hands.

After a long minute, the bird leans forward and starts pecking at her fingertips. 

Ekko winces - it looks like it hurts, especially with what he can see is a serrated beak - but Jinx just beams. “Oh, you’re so brave! What a good little bird!”

She keeps grinning at it as its pecking tapers off and the bird watches her for a minute before slowly stepping onto her hand.

“Oh, look at you!” Jinx breathes, and Ekko’s whole chest constricts at the look on her face. “Oh, you’re perfect!”

She slowly brings it out of the cage, looking at it barely a few inches away with bright blue eyes. It clearly isn’t a fan, batting its wings, and when she doesn’t fully back off, it pecks her in the forehead.

Ekko cringes, because it’s visibly broken skin, but Jinx just laughs and pulls back as she starts to bleed. “Okay, okay, I’ll leave you alone.”

He stops pressing on the bird, setting him down on the floor as she returns the magpie to its cage, and the second her hands are free again, Ekko’s scooting around Burger (who’s happily waddling over to Jinx's waiting hands) to kneel between her legs, cupping her cheeks and tilting her face up so he can look at the injury.

“That’s a nasty one.” Ekko winces, examining the small wound as a line of blood starts trickling down between her eyebrows down the side of her nose. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

Jinx shrugs, still beaming, before holding up her hand and wiggling it. Ekko almost gasps at her fingertips now being slick with blood from the other pecks. “Pain’s relative. Besides, she’s just saying hello. She's so brave. I mean, can you imagine? Something twenty times bigger than you that could kill you with a simple wrong touch, something that you've never seen before, and instead of trying to run for it, you say hello. Janna, she's such a brave little soldier."

His chest aches at the pure wonder in the gentle words, and Ekko grabs her hand, mindful of the thick, ropy scab on the inside of her wrist, and looks at her fingertips. Jinx doesn’t seem to care, just sliding one hand under Burger and picking him up to cradle him against her chest.

“C’mon.” Ekko says, getting to his feet. “We gotta get you washed up. The amount of bacteria-”

“Don’t be a worrier.” she sighs, rolling her eyes with a smile, and she looks so much like Powder he aches. “I’m fine.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’re gonna wash and bandage you up.” Ekko dismisses, offering his hand.

She looks down at the birds all over her, almost distressed, before looking back up at him. “I don’t want to leave them.”

“Alright, bring them.” Ekko sighs affectionately. “But you’re not getting sick because a bird pecked you.”

Ekko leaves her new room with Jinx on his arm, two birds on his shoulders (and one on his head - somehow not bad compared to the six somehow covering Jinx), and this happy settled feeling in his chest he hasn’t felt in ages as they go back to the infirmary, where he disinfects and bandages all of Jinx’s peck wounds as she chatters about the birds and insects, explains their DNA and modifications and names and personalities even though she’s already told him.

At some point, Ekko looks up at her while he’s cleaning her fingertips. She’s not paying attention to him, looking around as she talks, blue hair falling in her eyes, which she quickly shakes out before laughing at the bird on her head, who indignantly coos and bats its wings. She smiles brightly, bringing up her free hand to pet its head, blue eyes dilated and soft as she looks up at it, and sure, his heart skips a beat, but something else clicks in his brain, too.

She doesn’t look like Jinx anymore.

Chapter Text

Over the three weeks after she moves out of the psych ward and into her room, Jinx somehow both does better and worse.

Ekko gets a front-row seat. He’s practically the second resident of the room, working with her at her bench as she codes more of everything. He’s not sure how he himself feels about how she’s doing.

Jinx is happier. She’s sleeping (semi-)regularly, maybe four hours a night plus random catnaps throughout the day, and she has nightmares that leave her crying out so loudly it wakes Ekko up from the next floor down, but she recovers fast, and the dark circles are purple moons instead of black bruises now. She’s eating, and even if Ekko has to remind her, she does have a meal or snack four, five times a day, enough that she’s gained about eight pounds and doesn’t look like she’s about to break. Her injuries are healing, though she still walks with a limp, and the withdrawal is slowly fading, the methadone tapering off and Jinx’s hands becoming less shaky and her skin less sweaty and her eyes brighter. 

She’s constantly working on her projects, too - her flock has increased by two songbirds, named Porky (don’t ask Ekko why) and Vanilla-Bean (Jinx messed with his feather code and made the leaf warbler snowy-white and fluffy), a pigeon named Curtain (once again, no idea why), and another magpie (this one a neon blue rivaling Jinx’s hair named Green for some reason) - and on top of Pirate and Green both loving Jinx, the magpie now named ‘Admiral’ has taken a shine to her as well. On top of making new animals (and making files for eight more) late at night, she’s printed almost seven hundred plants, which Ekko’s been passing off to the gardeners to plant around the base to filter the air.

Somehow, in three-quarters of a month, Jinx has borderline-terraformed the entire Firelight base, even more so than it already was. The HexTech generator she made was implemented two days after she moved in, and they now have completely reliable electricity. The water filtration system was implemented the day she moved in, and next thing you know, not a single person has gotten sick from the water. With each new plant absorbing the toxins in the air and water, the air gets better, clearer.

Jinx is editing them, too - she changed the plants to be a generalist as well as an extremophile, so they can survive in a less toxic environment as well as editing their output so they all produce far more clean air so that they can survive in the improved base. Since, there have been few lung issues - cases of asthma are clearing up, pneumonia and bronchitis are practically eradicated, and everyone can breathe better. She edited the 3D printer to work at a faster speed, so it can make a plant in thirty minutes and a bird in twelve hours instead of a week. She’s doing brilliantly.

The entire place is better. Jinx is doing better. Everything is good.

On the other hand, though, she refuses to talk to anyone.

She’s been working on a lot of tech to help people. On top of her generator, water purifier, and plants being implemented, she’s also building prosthetics. (She’s also been having Jem, who comes in once or twice a day to talk to her, capture rats from out and about that are ill or missing limbs and practicing printing body parts for them, doing organ transplants (about ten minutes for a rat heart or pair of lungs) and printing limbs onto their bodies (about an hour - she says it’s not good enough for humans, though), but those aren’t actively being put out.)

The thing is, she’s put together eight prosthetics so far and sent them out, yet she hasn’t actually talked to the people she gave them to. She made Ekko go measure the stump and get their notes on what they wanted, handed a new limb back twelve hours later, and had Jem hook up the nerves and fit it in the infirmary. Zero interaction. Not even looking at the person. Hell, she even has Jem bringing her food. She hasn’t left the room since the second day she moved in.

He tried to get her out not too long ago. Tried to tell her about how Nilah and Jamie and Ella and Zeke wanted to see her, that they missed her, said it was just one dinner. She’d asked if it would be at the normal time (she’d apparently figured out that the one dinner with the others had been at a special time to help her acclimate), and when he admitted that it probably would if she was okay with it, she shut it down, saying the odds of a negative interaction were ‘nine to one.’

That’s the part that bothers Ekko. She thinks that everyone still hates her.

And yeah, almost-six weeks ago, they did. They were upset that Ekko saved her and were talking her execution. But now? Now that it’s public knowledge that Silco doped her to the gills, that she was almost-completely alone for six years, that he manipulated her into killing the people she did and gave her drugs that made her think none of it was even real and she wasn’t hurting anyone (and that she was in the psych ward because she was so suicidal and self-destructive when she realized)? Now that the knowledge that she was a victim in the situation is there along with her improvements to everyone’s lives and the entire base?

People are stopping Ekko and asking where she is. People are desperate to thank her, some asking Ekko where her room is with happy tears and others with gifts. People are trying to give her notes and trinkets and kids’ drawings and sweets, giving them to Ekko when he politely declines to share where she’s living and working. Everything non-edible is in a box on Jinx’s dresser and everything edible is in a sealed container that hasn’t been touched. (Jinx joked it might be poisoned, but that she doesn’t feel right having someone else test it and possibly get sick. She didn’t listen when Ekko explained that the odds of that are so low that they’re almost nonexistent.)

People are starting to love Jinx and they don’t even really know her. They know her history and that she can build stuff. They know she’s a broken genius and that’s it. They don’t know that she chews on her lip half the time, but especially when she’s focused, or how she starts talking so fast when she’s excited that Ekko can’t keep up. They don’t know about the gap between her teeth or her freckles. They don’t know how she hums when she works, or how he’s caught her singing in half a dozen languages (Ekko nearly crashed into the wall when he heard her singing in Proper - surprise, she has a beautiful singing voice that makes his heart twist painfully - and he practically spit his water when she started singing in ancient Shuriman and Noxian (as well as a couple songs in languages he doesn’t even recognize - how? )). They don’t know how gentle she is with her animals or how patient and kind she naturally is.

They would love her so much more if they actually knew her beyond the miracles she cooks up in her room.

Unfortunately, Jinx won’t let them get to know her, which is where Ekko’s going nuts.

The Firelight base is designed to be a utopia. It’s designed for people to work together, to live their lives somewhere safe and separate from the rest of the Undercity. It’s not designed for isolation. There are communal dinners. Most of the base is communal space except for the bedrooms. Hells, there are even dances for everyone to go to and talent shows for the kids and-

Well, the place isn’t meant for isolation. It’s really that simple. Nothing about the base or the Firelights is built for someone to be completely alone. And yeah, Ekko’s regretted that choice many times when he’s struggled to get out of bed, the weight of leadership combining with the weight of the world and his past to crush him and leave him wanting to rot in his mattress like it’s a grave (Jem’s diagnosis is ‘major depressive disorder,’ Ekko’s diagnosis is ‘everyone expects too much shit considering he’s seventeen and just wants to be left alone half the time.’)

But Ekko wanting to lay in bed and stay so still that he dies and Jem and Scar having to drag his ass up to function is different from Jinx being otherwise completely functional, just also hiding from the world. Because other than actually leaving the room, she’s great. She’s eating and sleeping and smiling, and she actually enjoys hanging out with Ekko and teasing him like she used to, and she’s literally making life and improving the lives of stray rats just because she can.

She just won’t leave.

Ekko even tried what works on him. He tried bribery, he tried physically dragging her out (she’d dug her feet into the floor, held onto the desk, and when he finally gave up and let go of the back of the chair, she looked at him like he was crazy), he tried telling her there was Something Urgent Outside That Needed Her Attention Right Now-

Nothing. Nada. She’s staying in here no matter what he does.

So now that she’s distracted, he’s gonna try the ‘physically dragging her outside’ again.

At the moment, she’s working, singing under her breath as she codes a new animal in the computer, Ekko (pretending to) work on his latest project (he’s designing a water heater relying on Jinx’s HexTech generator instead of solar power) but watching her from his place on her bed.

“Des chants de guerre depuis je compose… et dans mes airs je te tue en prose… j'ai le cœur en quarantaine…” she mumbles, and it’s Proper, and it’s one of the languages Ekko doesn’t speak, and that kills him a little bit in this moment.

Still, he stretches, casually and slowly sliding his plans to the side, before shifting to his feet, pretending to yawn.

Jinx stops singing. “Why are you tired?”

“It's warm and comfortable in here, and I didn’t sleep well.” Ekko lies.

She hmms. “Go to sleep, then.”

“I will.” Ekko says, walking over to stand behind her. The screen is nonsense to him, every pixel the A, G, C, and T that makes up the screen half the time, but it’s mesmerizing as her fingers don’t slow down, clicking away on the keyboard, and Ekko gets pulled in.

“It’s a bee.” Jinx says simply. “Super fuzzy little guy. Extended lifespan, heightened intelligence, better at pollination. First edition, but I think that with a few versio- NAAAAAAAAAAH-”

Midway through her explanation, Ekko grabs the back of her chair and yanks so that she can’t register what’s going on before she can grab onto the desk.

“EKKO!” she shrieks, trying to dig her feet into the floor and failing (she’s currently just wearing socks on her feet) as Ekko tries to pull her towards the door. “NAAAAAAH-”

She’s yowling like a cat, and it’s hard not to start laughing as he backs closer. “Five minutes!”

“NAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH-”

That one breaks him, and he starts laughing hard as he tries to find the door. “You’ll be back in a second!”

“EEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH-”

“You sound like a cat!” Ekko cackles.

“NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNAAAAAAAAAAAAA-”

When she gives up on hanging her hopes off the socks scrabbling on the floor and instead tries to get out of the chair and run for it, Ekko lets go and snags her by the waist, yanking her back and picking her up.

“NOOOOOOOO!” Jinx wails dramatically, twisting and flailing wildly. “YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO MEEEEEE-”

He’s laughing so hard he’s starting to lose his grip. “Five minutes outside! All I’m asking!”

She somehow manages to twist around in his arms, throwing her entire body weight backward so suddenly that they both topple onto the floor. Jinx immediately tries to scrabble away on all fours, but Ekko grabs her ankle and yanks her back.

“RELEASE ME, FIEND!” she shrieks, kicking out with her free leg and almost knocking him in the face.

They’re both laughing now, Ekko trying to maintain his grip while Jinx performs what can only be described as the best impression of a cat dunked in water that Ekko has ever seen. After a minute, he manages to get to his knees and drags her across the floor, making her yowl again as her nails scrabble on the wood. 

“Just- five- minutes!” he wheezes between laughs.

Jinx flips onto her back, eyes wide with mock terror but with squeezy, happy qualities too. “THE OUTSIDE IS SCARY! IT’S GOT AIR AND STUFF!”

Ekko laughs harder, tears welling in his eyes. “Your birds go outside!”

“THEY’RE BIRDS! I’M A CAVE CREATURE!” Jinx shouts, baring her teeth and hissing. (Once again, the effect is ruined because she’s clearly suppressing giggles.)

In one movement, Ekko lunges forward and wraps his arms around her waist, hauling her up over his shoulder and struggling to get to his feet. She, naturally, goes fully limp like a petulant child, resuming her hollering in his ear.

“I’M DYING!” she screeches. “I’M ALLERGIC TO OUTSIDE!”

Ekko adjusts his grip, huffing with exertion. “You are such a drama queen!”

“SAYS YOU!” Jinx cries out, suddenly flailing like a possessed marionette and knocking Ekko into the wall. “YOU’RE KIDNAPPING ME! I’LL BURST INTO FLAMES!”

“You are not allergic to outside!” Ekko wheezes through the laughter, stumbling under her dead weight. She’s not even heavy, it’s just the wild swinging between the flailing and limpness that’s throwing him off.

“HOW DO YOU KNOW?! HAVE YOU SEEN ME OUTSIDE?!” Jinx shouts, starting to yowl again. “YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH-”

“YOU’RE NOT A SLUG!” Ekko cackles. “YOU’RE NOT GONNA MELT!”

“I AM A SLUG! PUT ME DOOOOOOOOOOOOWN-”

She starts flapping her arms along with continuing to sound like a wet cat, and Ekko’s wheezing like an asthmatic harmonica, but he can’t put her down because they’re close to being outside-

Then, naturally, Jinx twists with a surprising amount of core strength and shifts all her weight to the side, managing to slip down his back, landing on the floor with a thud before immediately bolting on all fours (and failing considering, you know, the barely-healed bullet wounds and the fact that one leg is still in a brace) towards her desk.

Ekko lunges after her, diving onto the floor and catching her ankle just before she reaches her desk. She yelps, faceplanting onto the wooden floor with an ‘oof’ before flipping over and kicking at him.

“You’re- hff- not- winning-” Ekko puffs, pulling her towards him again.

“NOOOOOOOOO-” Jinx howls, clawing at the floor. “I’LL DIE-”

Ekko manages to get to his knees despite the stabbing pain in his abs, dragging her beneath him and pinning her arms to the floor. He’s hovering over her, both of them breathing hard and probably in pain from laughing so hard. “Five. Minutes. Outside.”

Jinx is panting and red-faced, but she’s grinning, even as she shakes her head. “Nu-uh.”

Sitting like this, she… shit, this sounds wrong, but she has texture. Her eyes are crinkled at the corners, and her crooked nose is scrunched up in that way that used to make baby-Ekko try not to turn red, and her teeth are crooked and yellowed like everyone else’s in the Undercity but she has bunny teeth and a gap between them too, and she has freckles dusting the bridge of her nose and her scarlet cheeks, and she still has the little scar on her jaw, and oh, she’s pretty-

Jinx doesn’t let him appreciate her, naturally, just using her better leg to flip them over, immediately digging her fingers into a spot in his ribs she must remember is particularly sensitive from their childhood.

It’s a real struggle, with Jinx playing dirty and trying to tickle him for about thirty seconds and Ekko taking the high road before he gives in and plays just as dirty, the two of them rolling around and laughing and screeching like little kids again before they give up, flopping down on their backs next to each other to catch their breath. They just lay there for a bit, Ekko wondering if he’s laughed hard enough to get more prominent abs than fighting and balancing and doing shit around the base has already gotten him, before Jinx pats his chest three times and sits up, groaning and rubbing her stomach as she slowly gets to her feet.

Eventually, Jinx stumbles back over to her desk, still wracked by giggles occasionally, and sits back down, turning back to her computer.

“I’m gonna get you outside soon.” Ekko promises, still breathing hard into the air.

“Fat chance, Little Man.” Jinx grins over her shoulder. “Also, I’m mad at you.”

“What? Why?” Ekko groans.

“You kicked me out of the zone.” she says. “I had my eyes perfectly zoned in so that when I squinted really hard I could see the letters, but you ruined it and now it’s all blobs. Way to go, chucklenuts.”

It takes a second to process, and Ekko turns his head to look at her in disbelief. “Holy shit, do you need glasses?”

Chapter Text

The next half hour is spent trying to coax Jinx into going to the infirmary so Jem can do an eye test.

“-and that’s why I don’t need glasses.” Jinx finishes her six-and-a-half minute rant with a gasp for air.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” Ekko sighs where he’s migrated to sit on her bed, looking down at her from the platform and holding up two fingers and his thumb.

“...two fingers?” she says slowly.

“Three. Pointer, middle, thumb.”

“Thumb doesn’t count! That’s cheating!” Jinx pouts, crossing her arms.

“Thumb totally counts!”

“Nu-uh!”

“Yu-huh!”

“I don’t squint!”

“You literally have frown lines from squinting so hard and you’re, like, two months into being seventeen!”

Jinx’s forehead quickly smooths out, his friend clearly now fighting the natural bunching of her muscles just to prove him wrong. “No I don’t.”

“Trouble, you actually have them.”

“No I don’t.”

“I can still see them!”

“No you can’t.”

“I-” Ekko huffs in irritation at the futility. “You need glasses.”

“Nu-uh.” she says, sniffing and crossing her arms, tilting her chin up stubbornly.

“What the actual hells do you mean, ‘nu-uh?’” he complains. “It’s not a ‘nu-uh’ kind of issue!”

“Nu-uh.”

Ekko puts his face in his hands and sighs. “It’s not a personal failure to need glasses.”

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t be as hot with glasses.” Jinx says, and he can practically hear the grin in her voice.

He looks at her over his fingers and gives her a glare. “Trouble. You weigh seventy-eight pounds, are covered in scars, nearly constantly have pigeons on you, have bad dark circles, and are currently wearing three sweaters and a jacket. You constantly talk about DNA and are a menace who hides under her desk whenever I try to make her leave. Somehow, despite looking and acting half-feral, you’re still insanely pretty. I really don’t think that being able to actually see things is gonna be what makes you un-hot.”

Jinx’s smile immediately turns sheepish, and her cheeks flush - he can’t tell if she’s happy about being called pretty or embarrassed - but she doesn’t say anything, just turning back to her computer. “Don’t worry about it, Ekko. I’ve been good without glasses forever.”

“You’re making a fresh start.” Ekko says back, careful to keep his voice gentle. “No more drugs, no more Silco, no more fighting. You’ve changed the entire base and a ton of people’s lives. Why can’t you cave this one time and have a positive change in your life?”

“I have had a positive change.” Jinx says. “I have you. I have my animals and plants. I can- hells, I can actually see straight. I don’t constantly feel like I’m dying. That’s a positive change. That’s a lot of them.”

Ekko quashes the warm feeling he gets at her words. “True. But there’s no need to make yourself suffer for no reason. Even if they’re just headaches.”

Jinx shrugs. “I don’t need them. I don’t get headaches.”

Ekko knows that’s a lie, but he also knew Powder well enough and is getting to know Jinx well enough that he knows how to force her to cave. “Your work would be better. If you could actually see without squinting, you’d make fewer mistakes. Less time editing… more time on the next project…”

She scowls, and Ekko knows he’s won. “Fine. But I’m not leaving. Jem has to come here.”

One win at a time.

-

An hour later, Ekko is watching in horrified fascination as it’s revealed that he and the rest of the Firelights are only alive because Jinx’s vision is, to put it as politely, as possible, absolute shit.

Jinx is perched on her chair, scooted to the middle of the room, arms crossed over her chest as she squints at the makeshift eye-chart that Jem is standing next to, and the doctor looks just as ‘what the hells’ as Ekko is feeling.

“E…” Jinx says slowly, squinting so hard that her face is scrunched up. “...F? Maybe P?”

The letter is O. It’s a very large, very clear O. Unmistakable. It’s the third row.

“O…kay. How about this one?” Jem says, pointing to the letter next to it - an equally obvious T.

Jinx leans forward, nose practically touching her good knee where it’s folded up. “L? No, no- I? No- H.”

“How have you been building anything?!” Ekko groans, dropping his face into his hands. “You can’t see the third row! How have you been shooting?!"

“And you can?!” Jinx snaps.

“Yes! I can! Most people can!” Ekko says, letting go of his face to gesticulate nonsensically.

“Bull!”

“He’s right. Most people don’t only get one right on the second row and none on the third.” Jem sighs. She’s been more cheerful about Jinx since she’s been seeing her eat at least a couple times a day and knows she’s happier and gaining weight, but she’s still not thrilled about anything Jinx does that’s not healthy - apparently, this includes her refusing glasses as well as refusing to leave the room. “In fact, that suggests distance vision of about 20/100 and even worse close vision.”

“So… my eyesight is really bad?”

“Yes!”

“Yeah, hon, you have severe myopia and astigmatism.”

“Oh.” Jinx says, chewing on her lip. “So… not normal.”

“No.”

“No.”

“Great.” Jinx sighs, hanging her head. “So I need glasses.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

-

The next day, Ekko watches with a barely-swallowed smile as Jinx suspiciously looks over the glasses, these clunky black things that Jem only got so quickly because somebody donated their old prescription that was pretty close to Jinx’s and she just edited to make them bifocals. (He’s honestly surprised anyone had one close to hers - she has 20/100 distance vision and 20/200 close vision, according to Jem, which basically means she’s practically blind.) 

“Why is there another part?” Jinx asks suspiciously, looking through the bottom.

“Because you can’t see close-up, hon.” Jem says, smiling slightly where she’s leaning against the doorframe, watching as closely as Ekko is from where he’s sitting on her bed. “They’re not poisonous. Try them.”

Jinx frowns at the glasses for another few seconds before slowly sliding them onto her face, her hands hovering near her temples like she’s ready to yank them off at the first sign of trouble.

Then her eyes widen and her jaw drops.

“Holy shit.” she breathes, eyes darting around the room and probably taking in details she couldn’t see before. “Holy shit!”

She turns in a half-circle before her eyes land on her birds and she practically throws herself across the room, moving fast even with a bad limp from two bad legs. “BABIES!”

Jinx throws open the door as she drops to the floor, immediately reaching in and grabbing at them in a way that would probably get anyone else pecked half to the hells. “YOU’RE SO PRETTY!”

She starts cooing at them in fucking Polish, squeezing them and moving their feathers and wings with so much wonder on her face that Ekko’s insides melt. “Kochanie! Kochanie, kochanie, kochanie! Jesteś taka śliczna! Spójrz na swoje małe buzie! Spójrz na swoje małe oczka! Twoje piórka są takie idealne! Kocham cię!”

Jinx freezes halfway through being swarmed, the crazy-bird-lady energy obvious as she slowly turns towards Jem like something out of one of those Topsider horror movies, covered in birds sitting all over her as she stares at Jem.

“You have pores.” she grins.

Jem huffs a dry laugh. “Thanks, hon. What every fifty-year-old woman wants to hear.”

“No! Like, you- holy shit! I can see you!”

She whips around and stares at Ekko, and Ekko’s breath disappears as she looks at him, mouth breaking into an awed, open-mouth grin as she gets up and limps over to him as fast as she can.

“Oh, holy shit, look at you!” Jinx gasps, grabbing his face and getting barely three inches away from it, looking him over. Her eyes are magnified by the glasses, and if she weren’t so damn pretty, she’d look pretty goofy. “You have freckles! And your eyes have specks!”

Her thumbs run over his cheekbones, and Ekko involuntarily laughs nervously and takes a step back. “Yeah. Uh, you do too.”

“How I look is old news.” Jinx dismisses with a wave of her hand, eyes still fixed on his face like she’s seeing him for the first time. “But you look way different now that I can actually see you.”

She gets back into his space, this time bringing them so close that their noses almost touch despite her being far shorter than him. This time, she’s silent, and Ekko curses the heat he can feel rising in his cheeks with the intensity of her stare.

“Can I help you?” he chuckles instead, hoping it masks how every part of his brain and chest and stomach that are even a little bit still gone for Jinx are currently either screaming ‘abort,’ ‘kiss her,’ or just running around or doing backflips while plain screaming.

“Your eyes are so pretty.” Jinx says without even blinking.

“Pff. Clearly how you look isn’t old news, then, ‘cause you need to look in a mirror if you think my eyes are better than yours.” Ekko blurts.

That was the worst line he could have said. Ekko considers if he can just pass down Firelight leadership and do a swan-dive into the river.

Jinx breaks into a wide smile, and the corners of her eyes crinkle again. “Aw, that was cute!”

Ekko’s just a puddle at this point. He doesn’t even know what he stammers as he tells her to go see if coding the bee is better now that she can see.

Miraculously, she actually listens to him, and he makes his lungs inflate and deflate properly a few times to calm his racing heart before looking back at Jem.

She gives him an amused look he can’t place before leaving yet again, the door clicking shut behind her.

“I have so many ideas.” Jinx mumbles - probably to herself, but Ekko can hear her anyway. “I’m gonna finally print the big ones.”

Ekko turns around to look at her over his shoulder. “Big ones of what?”

-

Twenty minutes later, he’s sitting with his head in his hands as she rambles about some of the absolutely fucking insane hybrids and bigger animals she’s coded but is still working on figuring out how to print because of the limitations of her printer size. On the list is a mixture of an orca and a bear (or a dog or wolf, as she’s ‘not picky,’ apparently), a deer with carnivorous tendencies and a jaw capable of unhinging that’s full of teeth, spider-puppies with eight legs and eyes, and miniatures of each as well as full-sized.

“You can see how this is nightmare fuel, right?” Ekko croaks. “Like, you understand why these are terrifying?”

“...you do realize how cute all these would be?” Jinx says, almost quizzically, like she can’t imagine why he’s terrified at the idea of a carnivorous deer that can run at speeds of seventy miles per hour, have four rows of teeth designed to tear into flesh, and be able to unhinge its jaw in order to get that flesh. “Like, the orca-bear-dog? Imagine an orca, but it’s friendly and has four legs and paws and is fluffy!”

“Trouble.”

“Spider-puppy! A little tiny dog that’s running around on eight legs? Think of all the little nail clicky-noises it would make!”

“Trouble.”

“And you’re glossing over my ideas about making birds with four legs, including penguins, might I add.”

“Trouble, you’re not committing crimes against nature.”

She looks over her shoulder at him, scowling before sticking her tongue out at him and turning back to her computer. “You haven’t even seen them yet!”

“And you have?!”

Jinx sighs like he’s putting the weight of the world on her shoulders right now. “C’mere, I’ll show you.”

Ekko’s a little terrified as he obliges, slowly stepping over silently to stand behind her.

“Watch.” Jinx says, switching the tab from the code to a blue webpage with a white line through it towards the bottom.

‘Hi,’ she types simply.

The white line quickly starts rolling like soundwave graphics, text appearing at the top of the screen. ‘Hello! How are you? What do you need?’

“Wait. Wait, wait, wait. This is Blue?” Ekko asks, immediately looking around for another chair. Upon finding none, he just gets down on his knees, folding his arms on the desk. “Oh, Janna.”

“Yep. Blue, Ekko. Ekko, Blue.” Jinx grins over at him. “Except she can’t hear or speak anymore. I changed her back to text-based.”

“So she’s aware but-”

“Blue is a computer, and she’s not conscious or anything. She’s just my assistant. I didn’t need her to have conversations - her job is to make sure everything runs smoothly. Double-check my code for mistakes and viability, predict and visualize outcomes, optimize builds, keep my interfaces clean, monitor all the animals and analyze them and their behavior, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, the- the brain is all me, but she keeps the whole operation running smoothly. Basically just keeps me from making mistakes, makes sure nothing dies, and runs theoretical tests.”

“That’s incredible.” Ekko says, and he genuinely means it.

“Thank you! Anyway, wanna see the projections for the animals?” Jinx asks.

Ekko side-eyes her. “Are you gonna show me anyway?”

“Duh.” she grins. “Look at this.”

She types in a command, and a 3D image (that’s beyond anything that Zaun or even Piltover is capable of, as the computers are usually low-resolution and barely able to sustain color beyond grayscale) pops up.

“Okay, that’s actually kind of cute.” Ekko says, looking over the orca-based creature. “Does it need water?”

“Nope.” Jinx grins. “This beauty is five to eight feet tall, about fifteen to twenty feet long, and weighs about four thousand pounds.”

Ekko looks at her for permission, and when she nods, he carefully takes hold of the computer and turns it towards him, taking a closer look.

The animal is, genuinely, incredible, even on a screen. It’s massive but sleek, on four paws ( paws, not flippers, though Ekko can see from here that the massive things are webbed) and looking around in the stimulation, its head slightly larger and taller than its back, unlike a normal orca. It’s fat and round and covered in fur, mostly black with white patches in the normal spots as well as white paws and orange patches at the joints. It has a relatively short yet standard-looking orca tail, a wide muzzle, big eyes, and - when it yawns - two rows of teeth, flat teeth in the front with sharp needles in the back. It has big ears as well as a dorsal fin, and it…

“How fast and how strong?” Ekko asks, mind racing. They’re big, they could be working animals-

Jinx almost huffs with laughter. “Thirty miles an hour on land, sixty in the ocean. Could probably carry about five hundred pounds on its back.”

“Orcas and bears are both aggressive. How’s the neural wiring on this one? Its behavior?”

Jinx takes back the computer and plugs in more commands, fingers flying, before turning back to him. “Watch.”

Ekko obeys, watching as the thing wags its tail, sits, rolls over, every trick in the book.

“It’s acting like a dog.” he says, mind racing faster. “It’s friendly?”

“Super. Designed to absolutely love people and attention, but it’s good at commands, especially from its imprinted person - uh, me. Basically, it’ll be a gentle giant unless I order it to attack or if I’m screaming and someone’s hurting me. It’s an opportune carnivore - it loves meat, but it’ll happily eat plants, too, it’s an omnivore naturally - and, uh… even though it’s friendly…”

“Did you design it to guard you if you want it?” Ekko asks faintly. “Like-”

“If I want it to eat someone, it’ll hunt them.” Jinx says, rubbing the back of her neck. “If someone’s hurting me or I tell it to attack, it’ll eat human meat. But I can easily tell it to stop. They’re going to be really smart, and they’ll know lots of commands.”

Ekko’s mind is racing. These animals could be used for defense, transportation - if it’s friendly except to certain groups-

“Could you train the animals to smell the difference between a Firelight and an intruder? Like, to tell who’s welcome and who’s not?” Ekko asks.

Jinx blinks, pushing her glasses back up her nose. “I… probably could.”

“And they’re friendly?”

“Yeah! Actually, I’ve got their brains and instincts designed to be relatively nonviolent - if I want them to eat someone, they will, but for the most part, they’re cuddly, and if someone’s being crazy, their first instinct is to sit on them and pin the person with their tail.”

“So they would be safe as guard animals, say, around here?” 

Jinx types something, and the image of the orca-bear disappears. In its place is a deer. Oh, no. “Here. This is better for guarding. More willing to fight. I can code it to have fewer aggression responses so it would be a better guard, though.”

Ekko watches, and he jumps when it opens its mouth, its jaw falling down to its neck in maybe a 160-degree angle, rows and rows of sharp, snake-like teeth inside.

It doesn’t look like a deer. That’s the thing - as the animal rotates on screen, its neck thicker, its eyes wider apart, its legs built for power, it doesn’t seem like a deer. It looks like a deer, but at the same time, it's so obviously not that Ekko is haunted.

It looks like a monster. Something in Ekko’s gut is screaming ‘wrong, wrong, this is wrong’ as he looks at the stimulation, even though it’s not even real.

“What the hell is that?” Ekko breathes.

“That’s a cervinid predator. Does it look like a deer? Yeah. Is it a deer? Hells no. It can run up to seventy miles per hour, even on rough terrain, climb trees and cliffs using serrated hooves, unhinge its jaw, and bite through metal up to two inches thick. On top of that, they can use echolocation, infrared vision, and heightened smell to find prey up to a mile away.”

Ekko’s legitimately struggling to breathe looking at it. The hair on his arms is standing up.

“Why would you design this?” Ekko chokes out.

Jinx suddenly looks very interested in her nails. “Long story.”

“Can you just- can you turn it off? I can't think.”

She obliges, switching it back to the orca-bear. This time, the animal is being put in simulated scenarios - running, fighting, rolling over - but it’s still so much better than the deer.

Ekko looks back at her. “Trouble. C’mon.”

“It’s not important.”

“Just a hint as to why you’d do that?” Ekko says.

She chews on her lip, staring at the screen, and Ekko knows she’s going to crack, so he just waits.

“Uh…” Jinx says, pushing her glasses up again. She’s quiet for a while again before she speaks. “Silco called me a deer when I disobeyed him and snuck out unarmed or wouldn’t shoot someone. Said I was a prey animal that people would hurt if I wasn’t striking first. I was pretty and soft and… well, not dangerous enough. Deer are weak and useless and scared, and because I wasn’t mean enough, I was apparently a deer. Got mad about being called that so much when I was fifteen, so I made deer that… weren’t any of the above. These are apex predators. Top of every food chain it gets put in. I designed its skin structure to be near-impenetrable, I built them to be aggressive, I made them extremophiles - they’re not weak. They’re not scared. They’re the meanest, biggest motherfuckers there are.”

Ekko’s chest aches at the thought of Powder - his friend Powder, always gentle and kind and afraid except when making bombs to defend themselves - being told that she was weak for not wanting to kill people on sight, and not for the first time, he considers just killing Silco. Unfortunately, though, he has to stay calm.

“Trouble,” he says carefully, “you… know that’s not how it works, right? Being kind and not immediately rushing into a fight isn’t the same thing as being weak.”

Jinx shrugs, not looking at him. “Tell that to Silco. He needed me to be scary, and I couldn’t exactly haunt everyone’s nightmares if I wasn’t ready to rumble.”

The phrasing of ‘ready to rumble’ from a seventeen-year-old would have Ekko laughing if he wasn’t so painfully aware of it all. That she was manipulated and drugged into hurting people, into killing people, for a man who sold her out and hurt her, that she was begging for death a few weeks ago because of how much it messed her up, that she’s terrified to leave this room because she thinks everyone might hate her as much as she hates herself-

Wait. She doesn’t hate herself, right? That- that wouldn’t be fair. It wasn’t her fault. The second she wasn’t high as a kite and the second she was safe and happy-ish, she was good again. It wasn’t her, just Silco and the environment.

Ekko sits down, leaning against the desk and looking up at her face. “How are you, uh, feeling about that, by the way?”

“About what?” Jinx says.

“About… what you did.” Ekko says carefully. “Under Silco.”

She tenses at his question, fingers going eerily still for someone who’s constantly moving.

“‘What I did’ wasn’t a thing, Ekko. I hurt people.” Jinx says quietly. “You- you can’t forget that. I know you think I’m good or whatever, but I hurt people. I wanted to. I was high, but I was still hurting real people with real thoughts and feelings and lives. I took their lives. I murdered them. Fifty-seven people are dead because of me. Nine Enforcers, fourteen Firelights, twenty-eight Chem-goons, and six normal people that just pissed Silco off or got caught in the crossfire. And that’s just what I pulled the trigger on or threw the grenade at. Do you know how many more I must have killed with the mines and guns and bombs I made? How- how much blood is on my hands?”

She raises one hand to her forehead, pressing her fist against it for a second, smacking it gently a few times, then not-so-gently hitting, and Ekko reaches up and grabs her wrist, holding her fist away. He squeezes it after a second, thumb brushing over the still-so-thick, still-so-angry scar that she got by stabbing a pair of surgical scissors up to the hilt in her own wrist and dragging it all the way up to her elbow, its twin still covered by her sweater, not having ridden up on that side. “Trouble, you’re already paying for it. You had to stay in the suicide room because you were going to kill yourself the second we left you with literally anything. You starved yourself for days because you were so torn-up.”

Jinx goes very, very quiet, not even breathing as she stares at the orca-bear on the computer screen for a minute. “So that makes it okay? That makes me, what, less of a monster?”

“No. It shows that you’re beating yourself up and you feel guilty.” Ekko says. “A monster wouldn’t feel remorse over killing people when told to or literally beg for execution when they started sobering up and realized it was real.”

It clicks in his head. The drugs, how Silco reportedly fed her tea that specifically had Valium and benzodiazepines and opioids-

“You didn’t think it was real, did you?” he asks quietly. “When you were hurting them.”

Jinx stops breathing again, and she clenches her jaw when her lower lip starts trembling.

“Trouble?”

“I thought they were mannequins sometimes.” she whispers. “Dolls. Sometimes I thought it was a dream and that I was at home in bed. Sometimes I thought everyone was a threat and trying to hurt me. But that doesn’t give me an excuse.”

Her jaw clenches tighter. “Your guys know that. That’s why that one guy was hurting me when I woke up in the psych ward.”

And just like that, bam, the Ekko who’s ready to kill in a fight comes roaring to the surface.

“What?!” he snarls, empathy and care disappearing behind pure rage. “What happened?!”

Jinx shrugs, but it’s the kind of shrug that someone does when they’re trying to squish down emotions. “He basically said you guys should just let me kill myself and made me walk around and stomped on my foot and shoved me and stuff. Insulted me a bit. It’s not a big deal.”

When she first woke up, she wasn’t even supposed to be moving because she had bullet wounds in one leg, a ton of dislocated joints, severe injuries, plus she was recovering from both a surgery to stop internal bleeding and almost bleeding out. And someone- someone laid his hands on her, hurt her-

“Who?!” Ekko snarls, getting to his feet and starting to pace. “I’ll fucking kill him. I’ll fucking drag him through the street-”

“Don’t.” Jinx says quietly. “Jem already hit him and made him leave me alone.”

“I don’t care! I ordered to have you protected and taken care of, I ordered everyone to take care of you, and I have people from the different divisions of the Firelights on a pseudo-council so that I have people making sure I don’t do something stupid and so I have all the information and so it’s balanced, but I’m still the fucking leader, what I say is still the fucking law, and whoever dared to hurt you-”

“Ekko-”

“I had everyone on the rotations informed that it wasn’t your fault and had them told to be nice! Besides, you were injured and scared, whoever fucking did that doesn’t belong here-”

“Ekko-”

“He’s being kicked out. I don’t care, he’s out on his fucking ass, and that’s if I don’t beat some sense into him first, how dare he-”

“Ekko-”

“That’s not what the Firelights are about. We are here to help people and take in people and give them something better, even if they’ve made mistakes, and if he can’t understand that, then he doesn’t belong here, I’m going to kick him out of the Sanctuary and I’m going to fucking hurt him for doing that, we don’t hurt innocent-”

“Ekko!”

Ekko stops and looks at her, anger pausing temporarily at the look on her face. She doesn’t look frightened or even annoyed, just quiet and steadfast and upset but calm. “What?” he says, forcing his voice into being gentle again.

“Don’t.” she says. “Just- don’t, okay? He was justified. He thought I was still Silco’s Jinx and that I was still a- a violent maniac. He saw a murderer when he looked at me. He was justified. And I- I’m not going to be the cause of any more pain, okay? You can’t hurt anyone in my name. I don’t want that.”

Jinx hugs her arms around herself. “I don’t want that. I don’t want anyone else to get hurt, especially not because of me. Okay? You can’t go after anyone for me. I don’t want any more suffering.”

Ekko can feel his nostrils flaring as he squeezes his hands into fists, trying to contain the boiling-hot anger. Someone on health rotation - someone trusted with some of the most vulnerable people in the Firelights - was willing to torture a suicidal, injured teenager for literally no reason beyond cruelty. Ekko doesn’t believe in turning people away, but that, that is an offense that is unforgivable.

Every instinct in his body is screaming ‘make them pay, show them that they can’t hurt who’s yours to care about.’ He wants to storm out and find the bastard who hurt her when she could barely stand and make him feel it. But he doesn’t. He looks at Jinx - really, really looks - and he doesn’t see a weapon, or a former enemy, or even Jinx.

He sees Powder. Powder, big, sad blue eyes and hunched shoulders and that quiet, hollow grief behind her eyes. Powder, who’s asking him not for forgiveness, not for sympathy - mercy. And not for her, for someone else. Someone who went out of their way to hurt her just for their own fun.

“Is that why you’re so scared to leave this room?” Ekko says, voice cracking slightly. “Because when I showed you around you saw people afraid of and mad at you, and whoever did that made you think that others here would hurt you?”

Jinx goes quiet, putting her hands in her lap and looking at them.

“Trouble.” Ekko breathes, dropping down to his knees at her side and looking up at her, grabbing her hands. “Trouble, you’re safe. I swear to Janna, you’re safe.”

“I’m not.” she chokes. Her fingers twitch in his grasp, but she doesn’t squeeze his hands back even though they’re locked tight around hers. “I’m not safe. I’ve still hurt some of your people, still traumatized them, and they’ll want to hurt me, and I- what if I have a panic attack or snap and think it’s not real and hurt someone else? I’m not safe around other people. They’ll hurt me or I’ll hurt them or-”

She makes a pained sound, and Ekko grabs her and hauls her into a hug, hooking his chin over her shoulder as he hugs as tight as he can without hurting her.

“I promise, you’re safe.” Ekko whispers in her ear. “I promise, nobody’s gonna hurt you and you’re not gonna hurt them. I won’t let that happen.”

“But what if you’re not around?” Jinx whispers. “You already spend a ton of time in here with me because you’re working when I am. You’re leader of almost seven hundred people and running a revolution, Ekko. You can’t always be with me. And if you’re not there to keep everyone safe-”

Ekko pulls back, hands still gripping her still-too-thin shoulders. “Okay. How about we find someone else who can help? Jamie, you- you like Jamie. Jem! You trust her.”

“Jamie and Jem both have jobs.”

“I can reassign Jamie! Oh, Nilah-”

“I’m not gonna be a bother.” Jinx says, refusing to meet his eyes and staring at his nose instead. “I’m fine in here. I’m safe, everyone else is safe, and I’m happy. I can just stay in here forever.”

He can’t figure out how to get it through her thick skull that her becoming a hermit just isn’t viable, and he looks to the side to shake his head in frustration when his eyes catch on the orca-bear, currently showing an image of one lying on its side napping.

Ekko gets an idea.

“These are meant to be guards, right? Working animals?” Ekko says, nodding at it.

Jinx raises her hand to wipe her nose on the back with a sniff, looking at it with him. “Yeah.”

“Make one. Just as a test. You can- you said its first thought is to restrain. What if you adjusted it to always do that? If you start freaking out, it sits on you, if someone tries anything with you, it sits on them. It keeps you safe, it keeps everyone else safe - edit the code so that it’s not going to eat anyone unless they’re actually hurting you, and even then when you specifically order it.”

Jinx looks at it for a long time, chin wobbling again before she chomps down on her lip. “I can’t. It’s meant to be several tons. My printer can’t handle it.”

Ekko thinks for a second. “...could you print it in pieces? Or maybe print it so that it’ll grow? Or-”

Her face lights up, and Ekko can practically see the lightbulb go off.

“I don’t need to print it big,” she says quietly, before she practically cheers, “I don’t need to print it big!”

She’s immediately turning back to the computer, going into its code, starting to type.

“I’ve never printed an infant.” she says excitedly, all sadness gone in an instant as she starts typing at full speed. “I print things to be fully-grown, even if they’re in nutrient sacs until I puncture them and start their hearts and orient them. They’re ‘born’ adults. But if I made an infant-”

“-you can print it without overwhelming the printer.” Ekko breathes, blown away once again at Jinx’s mind. Ekko may be a master engineer, may have built every hoverboard, might even be the best mechanical engineer in the whole Undercity, but he doesn’t think he will ever understand bioengineering and code like this girl, even if he studied it his whole life. “How-”

“It can be about eight pounds. Size of a puppy. It could grow to full-size over about eighteen months- actually, that might be better. Better neural elasticity, better bonding, time for socializing and training like a fully organic animal- oh my Janna, why didn’t I think of this before?”

“I don’t know,” Ekko says, watching in amazement as her hands fly faster over the keys. “What are you-”

“I need to make it so that bone density increases as time goes on so it doesn’t start breaking. I need to put in a new pituitary code so it releases growth hormone… changed digestive tract so that it can go from milk and liquids to normal food… adjust neural pathways for growth during development… modify the muscle tissue so it grows properly… imprinting properties immediately opening at birth… triple redundancy on non-aggression protocols so that it’s physically capable of attacking anyone unless someone’s actively being badly injured and calls the codeword or is screaming and putting out pain pheromones… should take about an hour and a half to code. You can go if you want.”

Ekko looks up at her. She’s still too skinny, still too scared, but she has a gleam in her eyes behind the glasses that make her look softer. She has light, she’s fighting, she’s still feeling guilty but she’s starting to try, she’s making things better-

She’s sure as hells not Jinx anymore. Even if she’s not Powder, either, she’s absolutely not Jinx anymore.

Ekko finds that he feels something close to adoration as well as admiration and awe as he looks up at her, her eyebrows scrunching before smoothing as she goes to squint out of habit.

“I’m good right here.” Ekko says. “I’ll wait.”

Chapter Text

It’s the day he announces war that Sevika quits.

She’d gone to Silco after two days - two days of Silco planning and executing searches for his daughter, two days of Sevika going through the agonizing cycle of screaming out her grief and breaking everything she can get her hands on in Jinx’s lab where she’s holed herself up before realizing she’s destroyed her dead pseudo-ward’s last things in the world and cleaned it all up with tears in her eyes - and told him that one of her anonymous sources had told her that Jinx had been taken in by somebody, that she’d been so badly injured that she had died, but she’d done so peacefully, that the person who had tried to save her hadn’t let her die alone, and when she was gone, she was buried somewhere nice. She had to swallow her tears. (Seventeen and gone. Seventeen and tortured and beaten so badly she ended up dead. It’s not right.)

Silco had gone empty, staring straight ahead for a moment before he screamed a pure howl of grief that Sevika had echoed a hundred times over the previous forty-eight hours, jerking up like a bad marionette as he went to the cabinet against the far wall and started smashing the teacups and glasses and bottles there, switching from raged, pained screaming as he threw them and smashed them with his fists to ragged breathing and stillness and back again. Sevika just lit a cigar with shaky hands.

He braced his hands on the glass-covered cabinet shelf, and he just said, “Who buried her?”

Sevika didn’t say the Firelights. “Source didn’t say.”

“Find out.” Silco said, voice eerily level. “They’re dead. Once everyone who didn’t save her is dead, we destroy Piltover. We burn them to the ground.”

And shit, Sevika liked that second part, but that first part-

“They helped her. Whoever did it- they tried to save her, and when they couldn’t, they made sure she died comfortable and took care of her with respect. We should be rewarding that.”

Silco sniffed, standing up straight before smoothing his hair back into place where it had come loose in his grief. “They didn’t save her. That is unforgivable.”

“If they tried-”

“Not hard enough!” Silco shouted, whipping around to glare at her. “They didn’t save her! Everyone involved needs to suffer!”

And Sevika snapped.

“Do you want me to torture you like the Enforcers tortured her, then?” Sevika had snarled, getting to her feet and flicking the cigar away. It hit the floor with a thunk and spill of ash - she no longer cared about respect, the man’s honor dead in the water. “Or did you forget that you were the one who got her murdered by selling her out?”

Silco’s eye widened before narrowing to a slit. “What did you just say to me?”

“I called you a sellout.” Sevika spat, too angry to even care. “I called you a traitor, I called you a coward, and I’m telling you that you are the sole reason that your barely-seventeen-year-old daughter was tortured and murdered.”

Silco walked over to her with aggressive footsteps, getting in her face as much as he could. “Choose your next words very carefully, Sevika, or you will be digging your own grave and buried alive in it.”

Sevika scoffed, using her full height to tower over him, reminding her ‘boss’ that while he may be basically the king of the Undercity, he’s 5’5 and rail-thin while Sevika is over six foot, muscular, the one who actually does all of the fucking heavy lifting through this whole damn operation, and carefully primed and enhanced to be a good fighter. “Are you gonna kill me? You? You, who can’t even run a fucking drug empire without a drugged-up little girl to play mad scientist and build you tech and kill for you? You, who hasn’t lifted a finger in years? You’re going to kill me, the one who’s been on the front lines of your fight, because I’m calling you out for murdering the little girl who worshipped you?”

“ENOUGH!” Silco shouted, and guilt laced through her when she saw the tears in his good eye. “I DIDN’T WANT HER DEAD! THEY SWORE!”

The guilt disappeared when she remembered Jinx’s screams.

“You believed them.” Sevika spat. “That’s on you. It always will be.”

He scoffs despite the tears in his eye. “So you’re staging a coup? I promise you, that won’t end well.”

“No.” Sevika said, and she didn't care if he sent someone after her - she just straightened and backed up. “I quit. I don’t work for the kind of person who sells out their own, let alone their own kid.”

Silco had just stared at her, like Sevika quitting being his right hand made less sense than a coup. “You watched them rip her apart. You watched them kill her. You helped me raise her. You don’t want Piltover to pay?”

Sevika leaned forward and spit at his feet. “I’ll figure out a way to get justice without having jack-shit to do with you, old man.”

When she left him, standing stock-still in his office, she automatically beelined for Jinx’s quarters before rethinking and going for the doors.

She’s rebuilt before. She just needs to go on a quick bender, and she can wake up a few mornings from now and figure shit out. What she’ll do, how she’ll survive, how she’ll get justice - she can figure all of that out.

Just… not right now.

Right now, she just needs to grieve.

Seventeen goddamn years old. It’s not right.

-

Ekko hates leaving Jinx.

He knows she’ll be there when he gets back - of course she will be, she doesn’t leave her room - but he doesn’t like her being alone. He’s been witness to one too many panic attacks and nightmares for that, and the memory of how she got the long scars on her wrists is still fresh - if things take a bad turn, as much as he hates to admit it, he wants to be there to restrain her if she has a panic attack or flashback and tries to hurt herself again.

Having said that, he’s also the leader of a massive rebellion group as well as their engineer, one of their main fighters, and the person who built the damn place, which means he has more responsibilities than hanging out with his best friend.

And, right now, shit is apparently hitting the fan, so he does have to leave to handle that. At the moment, he’s not too worried - Jinx is completely absorbed in the coding and printing of her baby orca-bear (ursula orcinus, AKA borca, according to her) and hardly paid attention as he said he’d be back soon -  but he’ll probably ask Jem to go check in if the meeting runs longer than about half an hour (a common ask).

He takes a deep breath as he goes and sits down with the other pseudo-leaders in the mostly-deserted meal area. “What’s going on?”

Scar’s chewing his thumbnail as his ears twitch, a nervous habit that he’s never been able to fully break but has managed to repress unless he’s really stressed. “Silco’s lost it.”

“That would assume he had sanity to lose.” Ekko mutters, hatred of the man both for hurting his own loved ones and for hurting the entire Undercity flaring before he tamps it back down. “How has he lost it?”

“Well, for one, he’s declared war on Piltover.” Scar says.

Oh, that’s got Ekko’s full attention.

“What?” Ekko says disbelievingly. “No way.”

Amy gets up silently, pulling out a piece of paper from her back pocket and handing it to him. “Look at these.”

Ekko unfolds it, realizing that it’s actually three pages instead of the one he thought, and immediately inhales sharply at the propaganda posters.

‘Piltover has oppressed us for too long! Turn in Piltover citizen’s heads to Silco for 10 coin a piece, Enforcer heads for 100 coin.’

‘WANTED: Jinx. Blue eyes, pale skin, floor-length blue hair, freckles, 5’1, thin build. Turn in information on murder for 100 coin.’

‘IF YOU SAW WHO TOOK THIS GIRL, TURN IN INFORMATION ON MURDER FOR 100 COIN.’

Ekko forces the breath to leave his lungs again in a shuddering exhale. “This is-”

“Bad. Really bad. He’s calling for a ‘complete extermination’ of Piltover. Paying for their literal decapitated heads. Saying he won’t rest until the land itself is uninhabitable. Trying to find who took Jinx after the Enforcers.”

“How bad is it so far?” Ekko manages.

“Forty Enforcers are dead, about a hundred civilians. These got put up two days ago. We also know that he’s distributing free Shimmer in exchange for military service.”

“He’s literally waging war.” Ekko says quietly.

“Yeah. He has his goons searching the streets and torturing people for information on us.”

“Us?” Ekko asks, head snapping up to look at Scar, panic immediately flaring. “He’s after the Firelights?”

“No. He doesn’t know it’s us.” Scar says. “He’s trying to find anyone who he thinks may have been willing to ‘rescue’ Jinx. Apparently, someone told him that she’s dead, that someone took her in and tried to save her but failed. He wants them dead for it. He’s after blood.”

That would be Ekko with what he told Sevika. Shit.

“He’s after us and he doesn’t know it.” Ekko says, trying to think. “And if he’s torturing people at random-”

“Eventually he’s going to get one of ours, and Jinx isn’t a kept secret around here. If he finds out, the Sanctuary is dead along with the rest of us.” Scar says. “What do you want to do here?”

Ekko chews his lip, looking back down at the propaganda poster in his hands. The picture of Jinx is outdated - her hair is in braids, her face thinner, her clothing the old crop top that was so impractical for battle.

“We’re not giving up Jinx.” he says, and when Scar opens his mouth, Ekko gives him a look. “It’s not because she’s my friend. You know how smart she is. What happens when he pumps her full of opioids and makes her start building weapons and killing people again? She’s not just a good person who doesn’t deserve that, she’s an asset, and you know it.”

He looks back at the poster, mulling it over.

“We’re on lockdown.” he says finally. “Nobody who’s had one of Jinx’s prosthetics leaves. None of her tech leaves. Hells, nobody leaves the Sanctuary unless absolutely necessary. No fights - we only leave for supply runs, and even then, it’s groups of twelve of the most experienced fighters and scavengers, and we count them regularly through each run to make sure none have broken off and gotten captured.”

“And for the Sanctuary, we maintain maximum security and set up rotating guards at all entrances?”

Ekko nods. “Yes. And we have everyone show their faces before being let back in. No masks upon entry.”

“What about new people? Right now, we have a mostly-open-door policy. If someone can find us and wants in, they’re in.”

Ekko’s chest tightens. The whole point of the Firelights is to take in people who need help and give them something better - they take in orphans, they take in the injured, they take in families, they take in addicts. They can’t close their doors.

“We keep them in quarantine.” he says after a long minute of thinking. “Keep them separate for about a week in a small section of the Sanctuary. We share some fake intel for each group, monitor - if it gets back to Silco, we start investigating.”

He hesitates.

“And, worse-case scenario, we need to put more defensive plans in place. In case this place is invaded, we need to figure out where we’re going to go, how to evacuate, how to defend.” he says. “And we need to put out fake intel for our location. Just rumors, if nothing else. Say that we’re… I don’t know. Not in a massive sewer grate.”

Ekko sighs, refolding the papers and handing them back to Amy. “Any thoughts? And no, we’re not handing Jinx over to Silco, and if any of you suggest that, I’m going to be pissed.”

Silence.

Ekko forces a deep breath through him, getting to his feet. “Right. I’ll start working on more ideas. In the meantime, just start the quarantine, patrol changes, and rumors, please.”

A rustle of fabric as they get up and start to leave.

Ekko waits to put his head in his hands and struggle not to have a panic attack until he’s in his room - bare compared to Jinx’s, no color anywhere, just a bed with one blanket and pillow and a desk cluttered with his engineering projects - and safe and alone.

He stays like that for a while - just taking long, shuddering breaths and trying not to be crushed by his own thoughts - until there’s a crash and muffled scream from Jinx’s room upstairs.

Ekko’s immediately jumping to the worst conclusions, taking the hoverboard instead of the stairs to get up to her as fast as possible, and when he gets there, almost breaking the door down in his hurry to get in even though it’s unlocked, he finds Jem trying to soothe a trembling, crying Jinx, who’s crushed herself into the corner under the desk.

“Hon, you’re safe.” she says, voice much lighter and melodic than usual. “You’re safe. Nobody’s trying to hurt you.”

“I- I didn’t-” Jinx gasps, nails digging into her scalp. Her electric-blue hair is falling all around her, almost disguising her because of how much there is and how it’s just enveloping her like a cloak over her head. “I didn’t hurt anyone-”

“No, hon, you didn’t.” Jem says, sitting down on the floor. Ekko’s trying to figure out what could have set it off until Jem looks up at him, brown eyes tired. “Jamie brought some tea, mug fell off the desk. The smell of the stuff Silco hid drugs in combined with the loud noise-”

“She thought it was a bomb.” Ekko immediately realizes. She thought she hurt someone, that she was drugged and forced to kill again. “Hey. Hey, Trouble, you’re okay. You didn’t set off any bombs.”

“I didn’t mean to-” Jinx cries into her knees where they’re up to her chest. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone- I didn’t want to- I’m sorry- I’m sorry, I didn’t want to hurt anyone-”

“I know.” Ekko says, keeping his voice gentle. “It’s okay. You didn’t want to. Nobody’s upset at you.”

“I didn’t want to kill anyone. I’m so sorry.” Jinx repeats, rocking slightly. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. It was an accident. It was just a mug.” Ekko soothes. “You haven’t hurt anyone in a while. You’ve been with the Firelights for two months and you haven’t hurt anyone once. You’re safe. You’re okay. It was just an accident.”

“I don’t want to-” she chokes. “Someone needs to kill me- I’m dangerous-”

Ekko’s heart seizes in his chest as he remembers how Jinx tried to commit suicide many times before the last one with the scissors. “No, no, don’t say that. You’re not dangerous. You’re good. You’re fine. You’re doing good things. Nobody wants to kill you, and you’re not dangerous.”

Jinx makes another sound, smacking her head on the underside of the desk a few times, before Ekko gets up, rushing over to the birdcage. He opens it, careful not to let all of them out, instead just reaching his hand in and grabbing Burger, who coos disgruntledly but calms down after flapping his wings a few times. He pulls his hand out with Curtain, Grenade, Pudding, and Pompom perched on his arm as well. They don’t dislodge even though he lightly twists his arm trying to get them off, so he just gives up and takes them too, closing the door behind him before hurrying back to the desk, dropping to his knees next to Jem. He gently places Curtain on her head, Pompom on her left shoulder, Curtain on her right, and Pudding finds his own way to her wrist as he grabs both of her hands, pushing them into the correct shape, and finally plops the fat pigeon in her hands.

Jinx’s shoulders stop heaving quite as much pretty much the instant Burger is in her hands, and after a second, one shaking hand finds its way to his back as her other adjusts to support the bird, and she squishes hard. The bird just closes his eyes and coos.

She keeps squishing for a second before she changes her grip and all but smashes the bird against her chest, wrapping her arms around it in a tight hug. Not for the first time, Ekko is impressed at how tame her birds are - Burger just coos, shifting slightly before settling, letting his feet hang and letting the girl ten times his size hold him in an inescapable position, and Pudding presses his little face under her chin like a cat, unable to move because her arm is pressing down on his feet.

“I’m sorry I’m a mess.” she croaks after another minute of silence. She doesn’t come out from her hair. “I didn’t mean to freak out.”

“It’s okay.” Ekko says, and after a second, he decides it’s okay to share. “I freak out when I see fire or a hulked-up Shimmer addict. After everything with Benzo and Vander. It’s okay. Shit happens. We’re okay. You didn’t set off any bombs.”

Jinx is quiet again, just sniffling, before her head bows further (making Curtain coo aggressively and flap his wings at his roosting spot being disturbed) and she presses her lips to the birds’ heads. “I don’t ever want to drink tea again. Never in my life am I going to drink it again.”

“Okay.” Jem says at the same time that Ekko nods and says, “That makes sense.”

“It makes me nauseous.” Jinx sniffs. “The smell. It makes me feel sick. And it tastes wrong without the drugs, and I’m never going to take them again, I swear on my life.”

“Okay.” Ekko says, offering his hand to her as Jem shifts, starting to clean up the shards of the mug. “That’s fine. Come on. You don’t have to drink it again if you don’t want to.”

She sniffles again before taking it, the pigeon still perched on her wrist, and Ekko knows for a fact that he’ll die before he lets Silco have his hands on her again.

Chapter Text

The next day, it’s much longer than the hour that he was gone yesterday that Ekko needs to disappear from her room.

This morning, he was woken from where he’d fallen asleep outside of Jinx’s door by Scar. (He’d had a nightmare of his own where Silco had gotten her back and she was who she was now but fighting them again, this time siccing the deer on him and looking down at him through the glasses that suit her so well as she killed the people she’s been so terrified of, so worried about helping, shooting people she’d flinched from and smiling in that way that makes her eyes scrunch up but that time in the context of violence.

It’s a stupid dream. She’s different. Silco manipulated her into hurting people. She’s so terrified of it now that she has panic attacks over dropped mugs of tea and has sworn off hurting anyone a dozen times and has begged for execution so she can pay and/or keep from hurting anyone else, holding herself differently and talking differently and acting differently and even making different facial expressions than she did when she was on the opposite side of the battlefield. She’s different. Jinx, to be honest, is dead, even if she’s still maintaining the name that it hurts him to call her - she’s not going to rejoin Silco or hurt anyone again even if she did. He truly believes that.)

See, they’d taken his advice about the bigger patrols, about all the crazy shit happening, instituting quarantines and making so many backup and evacuation plans that they’re lettered as well as numbered, 1A to 2Z so far, all approved by him. He’s making sure that it’s handled.

But unfortunately, on the first patrol after Ekko pulled them all back and sent out three teams, one didn’t come back.

Fourteen hours after they were told to report back, Scar came back and got Ekko. Said that the team of six people was MIA. After two other teams hit the streets in civilian clothes and still didn’t find anything, he said that he needed Ekko to go after them - as the leader who knows his people and their habits, the engineer who recognizes every single mechanical and chemical trace of the hoverboards, the ‘master tracker’ (Ekko questions the wisdom of that one) and fighter, he apparently has the best shot. Recon, just a quick check to figure out where they are, then he comes back and gets backup.

So Ekko’s leaving her for the longest he has since when she was a suicidal wreck in the protective room and he settled for asking Jem about how she was every other hour.

He doesn’t know how long he’ll be gone. Even if he’ll run into trouble or not.

What he does know is that, while he’s fastening his mask to his face and putting on his backup jacket (because Jinx still has his favorite one, and he desperately misses it, but she likes it and literally keeps it in her bed and it makes him warm in both the face and the chest and he’s not gonna bug her to give it back) and getting his weapons, his spear and knives and gun, he thinks he’s like one of those corny heroes that he used to eat up as a kid. He’s thinking about how they always used to make promises to their beloved, how they would say some cheesy shit like ‘I’ll come back, we’ve got a date’ or ‘I’ll keep you safe’ or ‘I can’t die and leave my girl behind,’ how they’d have the dramatic pre-battle moment where they would hold a photograph of their girl and press a kiss to the photo’s cheek before walking out like the weight of the world is on their shoulders.

Literally none of it applies. Jinx isn’t his girl, even if she’s his favorite person in the entire world and the best part of his life most days and he has a bit of a crush (can you call it a crush if it’s lasted a decade, AKA nearly 60% of your life?) on her, and he’s not going off to fight some glorious battle, and he’s sure as hell not giving one of those corny one-liners or kissing photographs.

Does he still think about her as he flies out of the Sanctuary via hoverboard, turned down to a lower speed so it doesn't create as much of a traceable or recognizable scent or visual?

…eh, nobody’s judging him. It’s his brain. Yeah, he is.

-

Silco’s held this gun easily a dozen times in the last twenty-four hours.

Most of the times he’s held it have been executing Topsiders that his men or coin-hungry Zaunites dragged in.

But, moments like this one, it’s just to imagine the weight of it on his tongue.

It’s difficult, sometimes, not to. The first time he held it and thought about it was right after Singed saved him. He’d lost Felicia. He’d lost Vander. He had no family, half his body was weaker than the other because of the stroke he had as a result of the head injury and his face was half ruined, his two people were gone - he didn’t know what to do. So he held it to his head and considered blowing his brains out, just finishing Vander’s job.

He didn’t. He found something to live for in the cause. He couldn’t do anything to threaten his own life - he had a revolution to lead, even if he just held it often as a reminder.

Silco didn’t hold it to his own head once while he had Jinx. She needed him. He couldn’t ever dream of hurting himself while she was dependent on him. But she’s not anymore. She’s gone. Jinx - Silco’s little girl, Felicia’s little girl, Vander’s little girl - is dead.

Did you know that Jinx is her mother’s carbon copy in the right light? 

Jinx is very much so Connol’s daughter, but she’s even more so Felicia’s.

It broke him, to be honest, when he first took her in. The roundness of her cheeks combined with her bone structure and nose and mouth and eyes to make her look exactly like Felicia did when Silco first met her and Vander rummaging through the trash for scraps. She looked like a copy, though Jinx’s hair and eyes were far more vivid and blue.

She looked more like her mother as she got older. Her hair curled in the middle and ends like her mother’s did when taken out of her braid, her face thinned into features that could pass as a twin’s if they sat side-by-side, an opportunity never afforded due to Felicia being dead at twenty-nine. She laughed like her, smiled like her, danced like her and had the same facial expressions as her and even did the same head-tilt when she was listening. She had her mother’s energy, her fierceness, her kindness, her liveliness.

(Fitting she died in the same place as Felicia.)

Still Connol’s daughter. Jinx had proportions closer to his, had his eye shape and his scowl, had his way of tapping his fingers when thinking through a problem - no doubt inherited his brilliance, though it was magnified by far in his daughter. But she was Felicia’s in a way that stabbed him in the right light.

Perhaps that’s part of why he did this to her.

When he took her in, it was because he saw himself, shattered by the person you love and trusted most. When he first started drugging her, it was to keep her calm.

But he started seeing Felicia. It was unbearable to let her leave and go where he was too far to reach her like he was from his dearest friend that day, unbearable to see her suffer, unbearable to hear her ever scream or cry, so he tried to fix it, both for Jinx and for Felicia. He made sure she couldn’t leave, kept her high all the time, kept her his, in the locked box of his heart next to her mother and her adoptive father and who he used to be.

It’s part of what first fueled his rage when other people started… perceiving her.

It started when she was twelve - lanky, but no longer looking quite like the little waif Silco’s always seen her as, looking like Felicia instead of simply a child and objectively beautiful. Men started lingering too long on her walk, their eyes dragging over her in ways that made his stomach turn and his vision sharpen like glass. Still, he bore it, simply having the twins and Sevika frequent her usual haunts in order to ensure that nobody tried anything.

There were a few times. A boy maybe three years older than her who asked if she liked the music with a smile and asked if she wanted to dance, a man much older than that who leaned over her to order even though the bar was empty - they all ended up unrecognizable and left to the rats. He instituted a curfew - reasonable enough for a teenage girl, right?

The shift truly came when people started pushing harder. Her drinks ended up drugged, Jinx’s head in the clouds and too preoccupied to pay attention if anyone slipped something into her sickly-sweet sodas no matter how much he prompted her. She wound up with the wrong amount of drugs in her system, date-rape instead of just the ups and downs and the meds to make her sleep or dissociate or become as sweet as her drinks. She’d end up slumped out of her chair because of rohypnol and the bartender frantically signaling for help before either Silco or Sevika could kill him for not watching her drink like they were all instructed to when it became clear she was too focused on another world to pay attention to this one.

The time that the date-rape drug dose had been near-lethal and the bartender had left her alone long enough for Silco to only rush downstairs when a man easily two feet taller was carrying her out the back, Silco had snapped. He’d fired three bullets into the man’s skull before he could even think and told Sevika to follow her from a distance from that point on.

And then she was drugged again a month later. That time, they succeeded - Jinx was missing by the time the bartender (the same godsdamn man - Silco had him executed once Jinx was saved) had fetched him, and Silco didn’t know where she was until he was delivered a video of them torturing her. In the video, she was tied down and her top was undone and she was writhing in pain and crying out as they pressed a stapler into her skin over and over and over. The perpetrator was a man whose child Silco had killed - he wanted to make Silco suffer by forcing him to see his daughter in agony.

Silco went in and rescued her, though not until after he himself was also captured, harmed, and Sevika had to free him. He gave her the lavender tea that made her childish and sweet and afraid to keep her from being too broken by it before going back to the man.

He cut off his hands and stapled the stumps. He sliced his face into ribbons and stapled his mouth and eyes closed. He left him to be eaten alive by rats and cannibals alike. It was barely enough revenge for Silco’s daughter, let alone Felicia’s.

After that, she wasn’t allowed to leave. Only his office, her rooms both in his personal home and in her little hideout, and the Last Drop, and only when escorted and never past eight at night. It was the only way to protect her from the people who saw a girl rather than his girl.

He didn't understand, even if he saw it. Though he’s always seen her as a waif, as a little girl, he can objectively see it - she’s ethereal. Beautiful. Inheriting the best of both her mother and father, a carbon copy of Felicia (an objectively beautiful woman) in the right light but improved by Connol’s genetics. Long, wavy, soft, beautiful hair that he couldn’t ever bear to let her cut. Big, owlish blue eyes that seemed to take up half her face, already beautiful and harmonious and lovely at fourteen, then fifteen, then sixteen, then seventeen. She was skinny, of course, unwilling to eat between her own mind and the drugs, designed like a stick instead of the curves or musculature that people like, but still pretty. Still perfect.

He’d never touch her, despite what the Chembarons and some of his own men think. The thought fills him with such visceral disgust even now that she’s gone. She was a child, his child, even if she was seventeen when she died, and she was his child. His daughter. Felicia’s daughter. Precious.

Still, there was the occasion that, looking at her, he could see why the men who had slipped her something wanted to keep her. He was blinded to it, most of the time, both by parental love and by the fact that he was already getting to keep her, but there were occasions, such as the one time when he’d overdosed her by accident, that he simply understood their mindset of wanting something so good, so beautiful and pure, to themselves through an objective lens.

He’s overdosed her more than the one time, of course. He’s been slipping her things for six years. Things go wrong, measurements get mixed up - but one was memorable, in part because of Sevika’s face when she’d found them.

She’d been in a bad way. She’d already sweated through a set of sheets, so he’d bathed her, undone her braids, and put her in a linen nightgown, the kind that keep you cool, before tucking her into bed, Naloxone in his pocket. When he did, he’d been struck by the fact that she was a vision - she looked exactly like one of the princesses from the old fairy tales, delicate and in distress. Her hair was fanned across the comforter in long blue ribbons, eyelashes stark against pale, freckled skin, hands curled lightly over each other on her chest. The fabric of the white nightgown had clung to her because she was already sweating so badly again, but her face was peaceful and porcelain and beautiful.

He’d sat by her side, watching her breathe, and when Sevika had walked in, he had unthinkingly said that she looked like a princess, told her to look at how beautiful Jinx was.

The look on Sevika’s face had been unforgettable. Pure, unfiltered disgust and horror. Rage. Contempt. Just, above all, disgust. She thought wrong - sure, he had confused her for Felicia for a moment, confused her for his best friend, her twin and her mother, but he wasn’t looking with lust, never that, just with reverence and awe and devotion and paternal, pure love - but she still thought it.

She hadn’t fled, though. She’d taken the Naloxone from him and sat with Jinx when he asked. She stayed by his side despite that look. The only thing that really changed was that Sevika kept trying to coax Jinx to eat - she refused constantly, only able to stomach food every few days because of the regimen of drugs, even becoming hydrophobic and refusing to drink when it was pressed to her lips when he’d been upping the doses - and that, when Silco had been drinking and summoned Jinx to his office, Sevika stood by the door even once Jinx was inside, watching them silently from the shadows.

That’s the thing about Jinx looking so much like the friend Silco lost. Now that she’s gone, it’s like losing both the person he loved more than anything for the first time and losing Vander and Felicia and the memories of the best part of his life all over again.

And it’s his fault.

It’s why he should pull the featherlight trigger.

He sent Jinx to her death. It was completely, irrevocably his fault. Sevika was right - even though the deal had been meant to protect her, he’d still sent his beloved little girl into the waiting arms of the Enforcers for a cause that now tastes like ash in his mouth.

He won’t.

He’s going to live for the exact same reason that he’s made sure four dozen people haven’t in the past two days.

Silco, you see, has nothing to lose anymore. Vander and Felicia are gone, Jinx is gone - even Sevika, as much as the two didn’t get along sometimes.

And someone is going to fucking pay for her death.

Scratch that.

Everyone is going to pay for her death.

He’ll kill himself soon enough. But not until after he’s burned Piltover to the ground and killed every last man, woman, and child who had ties to taking his Jinx away from him, everyone who celebrated her death while Silco uncontrollably sobbed behind a closed door, every single person Topside.

He’ll die. He doesn’t mind.

But he’s not going out until they do.

-

If Sevika weren’t chock-full of grief, she’d probably be having fun.

The thing about going on hedonistic, drunken benders is that, as fun as they are, she only does them when she feels depressed or broken. So, on the anniversaries of her sisters’ deaths or whenever she gets the news that one of the few people she still cares about is gone or her arm hurts a lot or something else along those lines makes her feel like shit, she goes out and drinks, drugs herself, fistfights, and fucks her way through the pain. (Which, by the way, is totally healthy behavior.)

Normally, her benders last anywhere from a couple hours to about two days depending on how bad or how new the pain is.

Well, after watching Jinx be tortured to death and learning that the girl that she was cruel to pretty much just to keep herself from getting attached and to keep her alive is gone forever a week into being seventeen because her father sent her like a lamb to the slaughter, Sevika is on her… second week?

She’s lost count, honestly. Days blur into nights that blur back into days, and it’s all smudged together in part because of the amount of hits to the head she’s taken and the amount of drugs and alcohol and whatever she can get her hands on to force the image of Jinx screaming out from the back of her eyes. She’s burned through most of her savings, though she’s gotten some back through gambling, both betting on her own fights and playing the slots and Blackjack and shit.

(Sometimes, when she was feeling a bit sappy, she would bring Jinx along to play Blackjack. Kid could count cards like nobody’s business - even high as a kite, even at twelve years old, she just knew how, knew the numbers and the patterns. She was good with them. (Hells, she memorized the genetic codes that she used for her printer, even if they were dozens of random letters.) She’d sit there on the chair that she’d scoot as close as possible to Sevika - the only time that Sevika would let her sit that close - and her big blue eyes would lock on the cards with a gleam in her eye like her crows would have. She’d tap on Sevika’s arm once for hold, twice for hit. They cleaned the house out a ton of times - Jinx gave her half of the winnings back to Sevika, though, in exchange for new parts. Jinx didn’t like gambling like Sevika, but she adored the puzzles, would get so happy she’d do that weird hand-flapping thing that Silco told her never to do in public but which Sevika ignored. She’d do the calculations on the slots, on Blackjack, even roulette, though Sevika never let her play poker, if nothing else because the kid was an absolutely horrible liar. Every time that Jinx got them to be high in the green by the end of the night, she’d beam at Sevika like she hoped that she’d be proud of her because she was good at math. Sevika had never said anything, just quietly slipped hard candies into her top desk drawer as thanks on top of the supplies she’d get Jinx with her winnings.

She hadn’t taken Jinx gambling since she was fifteen. Jinx had finally realized Sevika wasn’t going to ever act like she loved her, realized that Sevika was just a jerk and had started ignoring her and talking back. Sevika had been such a bitch to the little girl who was so smart and sweet and who just wanted someone other than Silco to tell her she could be loved - why? Why hadn’t she just actually acted like she felt?)

Sevika takes another swig off the bottle of alcohol (she doesn’t even know what kind at this point, stopped keeping track) and lets her chin touch her chest as she tries to breathe.

She’d been away from Jinx in the past. Had weeks where she was out of town for business, or Silco said that nobody could go in to see her, or even when she hadn’t been in the mood to exist around the kid.

But the thing is, that’s different. That’s knowing that, when she comes back and looks in her usual places, she’ll find her. That’s knowing that Jinx is asleep or working, that she’s safe because of Silco’s goons that she made maintain suicide watch when she had a bad feeling and was gone.

This is knowing that Jinx is dead. That she’s decomposing somewhere. That she died thinking Sevika hated her, alone and afraid and in pain. That she didn’t have to die, but her own father sent her to her doom anyway - for what, anyway? A revolution? What good is that when the only reason Zaun is free is because a scumbag gave a seventeen-year-old over to a bunch of sadists in a corrupt deal that has no honor? The path to freedom is apparently built on unjustly, dishonorably-spilled blood.

Sevika would take a real fight over that.

She takes another swig, but when she looks up, she sees it, just for a split second before it disappears into the shadows.

Ekko. He was on his hoverboard, masked-up and in a new jacket, but still distinct with his white dreads and tech and mask, before he disappeared.

Sevika’s on her feet before her body - breaking down after weeks of little food and sleep, too much drinking and drugs and fucking, and a lack of prosthetic care - can catch up and shoot pain through her, and before she even knows what she’s doing, she’s following the slight distinct smell of the hoverboard.

She wants to visit her grave.

It’s a meaningless pursuit. It won’t bring Jinx back. But what it will do is at least let Sevika think she’s made peace.

Perhaps when she sits in the dirt, runs her fingers through it as she apologizes and tells the truth, that Jinx was always loved and Sevika was proud and that she’s so, so sorry that she treated her like shit just so she wouldn’t get attached, that she wishes she hadn’t, she can finally breathe.

-

The fact that Ekko can trace their locations is a good thing.

Just like with the HexCore, their energy source is relatively unique - not as unique, of course, but something a hell of a lot less common than, say, water - and able to be tracked, especially in groups. Most people don’t, but Ekko keeps track just in case. (The rest of the Firelights say it’s impossible because people use it in prosthetics so it shouldn’t be trackable, but to that, Ekko says that someone must be stupid because he figured out how to reliably track their hoverboards using radiation and chemical signatures in a solid day, even if he’s seemingly the only one who can make sense of the readings on his tiny screen and differentiate them. Engineering, baby! It’s fun, especially when people say you can’t and you get to prove them wrong!)

The fact that he knows where they are is a good thing.

What is not a good thing is that they’re still.

Firelights move. It’s kind of their thing. Life is movement, and they are alive and constantly moving, even at rest and especially when on patrols when they have a job to do.

The fact that they are still is a really, really bad thing.

It means something is very wrong.

This is further confirmed when Ekko finds the location, and it’s an abandoned warehouse.

When he turns his hoverboard off, folding it under his arm before snapping it to its holster beneath his jacket, he quietly slides open a window towards the top and ducks inside, careful to keep his footsteps light and silent as he presses his shoes to the wall as he tries to get a good grip on the bricks.

Inside, once his eyes adjust, he almost vomits.

His people are all hung on meat hooks.

The iron is through flesh, sinew, hooked through backs and biceps and thighs. Some are missing limbs. Others have visible injuries even from fifty feet up in the air, burns and cuts and brands. All of them are missing their masks, a deliberate humiliation that makes him feel even sicker.

Ekko does a search. There’s nobody in the same room as them. Back rooms? Maybe. But in this, the main area where his people are strung up like racks of beef instead of humans?

Nobody.

Without a second of hesitation, he starts to parkour his way down. Even though he feels bad, he doesn’t let any of it take the wheel - he stays steady on his hands and feet as he makes his way down by jumping back-and-forth down the corner. He doesn’t think too hard. That’s how he’s always done this, how he’s always survived. Focus first, think and feel later. Logic, not emotion.

He drops onto the floor and rolls to muffle the impact, eyes quickly scanning them for signs of life.

They’re all alive.

All of them are still breathing. Some are twitching. Others seem vaguely conscious, though not well enough to do much but have their eyelids flutter open.

Six people. All in bad shape, four missing limbs and two more with limbs that are bright red and clearly shattered - compartment syndrome, if he had to guess.

All alive.

He has to get them out of here. Now. Fuck reinforcements.

Ekko’s immediately doing the math. He carries two - ties Zionne, who’s missing both his legs at the thigh where his flesh is burned in a piss-poor attempt at cauterization, at the wrists to carry him on his back, carries Sori, the youngest, in his arms bridal-style - and ties another two to the board, one on the back and another between his feet-

No. No, there are six people. That won’t work.

Ekko tries to do the math as he goes up to Zionne, who glances at him through swollen eyes before smiling. “Damn, boy, that was fast.”

“Always am. Don’t talk. Gonna get you out.” Ekko says as he begins to work the hook free. He almost cries at Zionne’s unintentional cries and whimpers as he works it out from the middle of his shoulder before immediately ripping off part of his jacket to make a tourniquet for it, supporting him under his arms as he lowers the man to the ground before tying it with another gasp. “It’s not exactly dignified, but I’m gonna tie your hands together and have you hold onto me as a backpack, alright?”

Zionne grins again, but his black lips - he always uses black lipstick, even at twenty-six, says it makes him look punk - are turning red where the lipstick has smudged. “You sure you can do that, short stack?”

Ekko rolls his eyes in a forced response as he rips off another strip, this time with less struggle, to bind his hands. He can’t keep the shake out of his voice. “You’re all leg, you bastard.”

After testing the tie, Ekko hefts Zionne, getting another pained sound as he puts his head between his arms. “Be my lookout, yeah?”

Ekko starts with the conscious ones. He wants to spare them pain.

More accurately, he starts with Sori. She’s sixteen, a year younger than him, and she has a Firelight symbol branded onto her cheek. She’s crying where she’s strung upside down, hooks through her thighs.

“I didn’t tell-” she sobs as Ekko quickly ties tourniquets at her hips before starting to work the hooks out. “I swear, I didn’t tell-”

“I know. I know you didn’t. You did so good.” Ekko says as he gets one free with a cry at the barb. “You did so good. I’m so proud of you. We’re gonna get you home, okay?”

She screams when he frees the second one and catches her, putting her over his shoulder and quickly ripping off the hem of his jacket (this time he needs the help of his knife) to tie her on him. “I’m gonna try to carry all of you, ok-”

“EKKO!” Zionne shouts, and when he whips around, he’s immediately hit hard in the face with a metal pipe wielded by a guy that’s easily three hundred pounds.

In fact, he’s hit so hard that his titanium-and-ceramic mask shatters on his face.

His vision whites out with the force of the blow as it shatters smack in the middle, splitting his face from the top of his forehead to the tip of his nose, getting several pained cracks.

He’s not sure if he’s standing for a second as some pieces fall and some pieces stay in his skin. He’s not 100% sure where he is. There’s high-pitched ringing in his ears, the room is spinning, he’s gonna pass out, he’s not gonna-

It’s only when the guy goes for his leg that he shakes it off and starts to fight.

He uses his knife, still in his sleeve, to stab him in the diaphragm, then the throat, and as the guy goes down, Ekko processes Zionne shouting again, whips around, and stabs another, this one a woman and this one requiring more force as he stabs her in the temple. She goes down before she can even fire her gun, which Ekko quickly snags and holds up, pointing it around.

He’s surrounded.

Fuck.

There are easily eighteen, twenty people, all out of nowhere, circling like sharks.

Ekko is going to die here.

-

It takes Sevika a hell of a long time to get down the warehouse after the bug.

See, while he’s seventeen and limber, Sevika is almost forty, has about a dozen bad joints, and is generally shit at parkour, so while he’s down in what must be less than thirty seconds, it takes Sevika almost ten minutes to work her way down metal beams after him. She can hear him doing something with the chains hanging from the ceiling - he’s not leaving, she can take her time so she doesn’t break her fucking neck trying to rush.

What she doesn’t expect is to peek over the beam edge where she’s balancing and see that there are a ton of Firelights strung up like puppets and the kid is trying to get them down.

She really doesn’t expect him to be able to support two of them without breaking a sweat.

And she completely, absolutely doesn’t expect shouting, and when she looks over, the kid, clearly injured based on the blood from him on the floor, surrounded by one of Silco’s pet gangs with a knife, a gun, two people strapped to him, and four more that he has to protect.

Sevika’s been in enough fights to know that there’s no good end for him. One against twenty, not well armed, and with injured civilians to protect? No, he’s dying here.

But the thing is, Sevika feels some kind of obligation considering that he tried to save her ward.

And she’s had a very, very shitty few weeks.

And these are Silco’s people - she recognizes  them.

And Silco’s the bastard who got Jinx killed.

So when one shouts and runs at Ekko, Sevika decides that’s enough and jumps.

She doesn’t drop gracefully or quietly. She just lets go of the beam and drops the twenty feet onto the concrete floor between the two of them, landing hard enough that her knees scream and her prosthetic arm sparks where she jars it. But she’s up before any of them can process, and before the guy can even stop moving, he’s twitching and dead on the floor.

“GET THEM DOWN!” she shouts at the bug, and he quickly obeys as she starts to fight with a “FUCK YOU, MOTHERFUCKERS!”

The fight is messy, brutal, and exactly what Sevika needs.

She’s been bottling up weeks of grief and rage and guilt, and now she gets to take it out on the bastards who work for the man who murdered the kid she should have protected. Every single hit is for Jinx. Every bone she breaks is for the little girl who just wanted someone to love her, every scream she gets is for seventeen years that got stopped too young because Silco was a coward.

Ekko, to his credit, adapts fast. The moment Sevika is in the fray, he’s moving, tying tourniquets and withdrawing hooks and laying people down, stabbing or shooting anyone who gets too close. He’s good - better than she expected, honestly. Fast, precise, doesn’t waste movement or ammo - lets her take care of it unless his cargo are threatened, in which case it’s one shot.

It’s over in less than five minutes.

When Sevika turns around, Ekko - Janna, he looks bad, blood covering his face from a black gash down the center with shards still in it - has everyone down and is trying to get them all on him and his board.

Sevika flexes her arm, whirring in a bad way because of too much use and too little maintenance and WD-40 and covered in blood that’s not hers, before going over.

“What do you need me to do?” she asks, voice rough.

“I- I don’t know.” he stammers, frantically trying to support what must be four hundred pounds of extra people and failing.

“Give them to me.” she orders.

He looks at her like she’s crazy even though his eyes are far-away and foggy - one hell of a concussion - and she holds out her arms. “I’ll carry some of them. Give them to me.”

“I- the base is supposed to be a secret-” he chokes out, but when he looks back at his people, he looks back at Sevika with an expression of dread.

“If you come, you either don’t leave or you don’t tell Silco.” Ekko says. “If you do either I’ll kill you myself.”

“Deal.” Sevika says without hesitation, taking two people up in her arms, one in each. “You got another one of those hoverboards?”

-

Jem has never seen a situation this bad.

She’s seen war. She’s seen people die. She’s seen people tortured. Hells, she identified her son’s body after he was shot to death and watched her wife suffocate because she couldn’t get a lung transplant.

She hasn’t ever seen six people tortured like this, some beyond recognition.

She triages them in her head as all four of her medical assistants work to stabilize them, Jem more focused on trying to figure out how to keep them all alive afterwards.

Zionne, he’s bad. The leg wounds are chopped messily at the mid-thigh before being poorly cauterized. They’re going to get infected, even with antibiotics. She’s going to have to cut more off. His arm needs to be chopped, too - the second the tourniquet comes off, it’s going to release a whole lot of rust into his bloodstream and cause massive damage. He won’t make it. She needs to chop it.

Sori, she’s mildly better. The hooks missed the major arteries by millimeters, but she’ll survive, though she’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. The brand - brands, Jem found more on her chest and back and stomach, some just pokers, others symbols, like the Firelight symbol branded onto her cheek - is ugly and will leave a permanent scar that will be psychologically shattering. On top of that, the girl’s clearly in shock, sobbing and swearing that she didn’t talk.

Kael is worse. He has compartment syndrome in all four limbs, all shattered with either a brick, a hammer, or a pipe - Jem can’t tell. She needs to amputate all of them at the elbows and knees, and she needs to fix the hook wounds over his hips.

Emmlah is going to die. Jem isn’t sure how to save her. She has a bleed in her brainstem because of a hook at the base of her skull that Jem won’t be able to stop - she’s unconscious, which is probably for the best. Nobody’s working on her - she has a morphine drip. That’s all they can do.

Chess and Ronin, the twins, they have similar injuries. Both are missing their left arms, but they also have similar internal injuries. Both had hooks through their chests, causing a punctured lung in Chess and a nicked artery in Ronin. Jamie, who’s actually been training under her as a surgeon and who’s damn good at it, is already on it, going in with a heat-pen ready to cauterize. Both of them must have had toxins from the hooks in their systems, as well - both of them are going into kidney and organ failure as well as compartment syndrome in Ronin’s foot.

Meanwhile, Sevika - whom Jem only recognizes from stories - is swaying on her feet and visibly unwell and malnourished, while Ekko has a deep gash down the middle of his face with shards of his mask in it (how hard was he hit?) and what’s clearly a broken nose, skull fracture, and bad concussion, possibly a brain bleed, as he sways on his feet.

Jem doesn’t think she can save most of them, honestly. Zaunites don’t have organs to transplant over, so the twins will likely die as well as Emmlah. Kael and Zionne are going to basically be basket cases. Sori doesn’t seem like she’ll psychologically recover.

And that’s why she turns to Ekko, whom she’ll administer medical care to in a minute, and says, “Get her.”

“Huh?” he says, clearly off because of the head injury.

“We need our friend who’s good with innovative medical procedures.” Jem says, mindful of Sevika and unsure if Silco’s man can be trusted. “I don’t care if she doesn’t want to come down. Tell her we need her to save six people and only she can do it.”

And that’s the thing. Jem genuinely thinks she can. Over the past month and a half, Jinx has improved her printed organs and limbs and body parts exponentially - whenever she gets one of the disabled rats Jem catches and brings to her when she’s bored, she sets it free better than before with fully-organic limbs and organs.

Jinx says it’s not ready for humans yet, that she doesn’t want it to take too long. But Jem knows that there are multiple compartments in the damn printer because of how she prints the birds - she can print an arm and a kidney at the same time, and Jem’s seen her speed it up. At its fastest, the printer can spit out a rat heart in a minute.

Hells, maybe she can even print a spinal cord.

Ekko blinks hard, clearly trying to clear the fog in his head. “She doesn’t come out.”

“Tell her six people will die if she doesn’t and help her down. Find Scar on the way and have him get the equipment, I don’t trust you not to fall. I’ll fix you the second you’re back. And you-” she spins on Sevika. “You go and sit in the private room over there. I’ll fix your prosthetic in a minute. We need to keep you in isolation until we can trust you. Ekko! Now!”

To Jem’s surprise, as Ekko leaves and Chess starts convulsing, Sevika complies, quietly going over and shutting herself in the room.

She doesn’t have time to dwell, though, as she starts prepping the blood samples that Jinx will need.

Chapter Text

Jinx stands at the threshold of her room, cradling Chompy (the newly-printed borca, weighing almost fifteen pounds) in her arms, stubby legs kicking in the air because of how he’s being held like an infant, and with eight birds covering her as she looks out the doorway.

Jinx hasn’t left this room in weeks. This is the farthest she’s gotten, and it’s to let her birds go on a short flight before calling them back using a computer frequency after about fifteen minutes. But Jinx herself? She hasn’t left in over a month.

She knows that, no matter how hard she tries to make things right, the Firelights have to hate her. It’s the only thing that makes sense. She killed so many, both with her own hands as well as with the weapons she designed, and she hasn’t saved nearly enough people to even begin to compensate - Jinx is counting a ten-lives-saved-to-one-life-taken ratio as an acceptable start to paying back what she owes (start - she’ll never make it up) - and she’s fucked-up anyway. It’s why they had to do a special mealtime to socialize her forever ago. It’s why only Ekko and Jem and Jamie (occasionally) are allowed inside.

It’s why she’s separate and alone except for the few people who can stand her, two of whom she’s 99% sure secretly resent her (Jinx killed Jem’s son and Jamie had been in a fight with her before and seen her giggle as she killed people - they have to hate her) and the last person, the only one she fully, forever believes cares about and loves her, is currently away and currently desperately missed by Jinx.

Jinx is hated. That’s become a fact of the universe, just as much as that her name is Jinx and she’s a monster. She’s hated. They all despise her, even if some are too polite to show it. She should just stay here forever.

Even though, unfortunately, the filter on the water unit is in need of replacement.

Jinx’s water filtration system is fantastic. It’s built to work like a charm, produce perfectly clean H2O no matter what filth it takes in, layers upon layers of filters and pipes working together in a twisting labyrinth to make it perfect.

But while the mesh and salt and chanical and UV and ceramic and ion exchange filters all are set for the water filtration unit’s lifetime, the charcoal and carbon filters need to be changed out every 40,000 gallons - AKA about five hundred big bathtubs. 

And, in order to support the plants and agriculture and science going on here as well as seven hundred people, that’s gone pretty fuckin’ fast. Just under a month, and they need to be changed.

It’s a five-minute job. It’s an easy replacement.

But Ekko isn’t here, disappeared out of the Sanctuary for ‘urgent business’ that he didn’t tell her much about in his rush, and since Jem and Jamie are both busy, not here, and don’t know how to do it, Jinx has no choice but to go downstairs, the two replacements tucked safely in her pocket and her animals as emotional support.

Jinx isn’t physically strong enough to withstand a fight. She knows that. She’s barely over five-foot, about eighty pounds even after gaining weight, just free from withdrawal, and still limping like crazy and with a shit ton of aches still lingering from getting tortured. She’s physically small, she’s physically weak, and she doesn’t have a weapon - if she gets attacked, she’s pretty much a dead girl.

Still, what choice does she have? The river water running by the Sanctuary is toxic without Jinx’s filter. It would hurt people to let the water get bad again. Food would go scarce again, people wouldn’t be able to drink or bathe, people would start getting sick again-

Even if Jinx is as good as executed the second she gets cornered by someone who sees who she is and isn’t afraid to be honest, she can’t let that happen.

She hugs Chompy tight enough that he squeals, making the scream-chitter that marks orcas, before blinking back tears.

She’s too easily recognized. Her hair is long and neon-blue and dragging on the floor, and Jinx already tried putting it up to hide it underneath the hood of Ekko’s jacket (which she’s wearing - he hasn’t asked for it back yet and she’s not turning it over til he does), but all that ended with was four broken hair ties and her hair still obvious, either making an obvious lumpy shape beneath the hood or still falling out the bottom of the jacket.

Jinx takes another deep breath, pushing her glasses up with her wrist, because Pudding is on her head and Burger and her finches are on her shoulders and Pompom is eyeing Chompy with the biggest side-eye the little asshole is capable of from her forearm while Curtain and Grenade awkwardly try to climb on her chest (joke’s on them, she’s still skinny enough she barely has tits for birds to sit on.)

Jinx finally, after forever, forces her leg forward and takes a step out. Her soft shoes, mostly black padding with an arch support inside, are just enough that she doesn’t feel the wood under her feet, but she appreciates that her footsteps are literally silent.

That’s good. The water filter is right on the river, also known as the thing running along the fucking main area, which means she needs to move fast and quiet to change the filters and get the fuck back before anyone gets her.

Jinx slowly creeps along the hallway, staying pressed close to the wall and at least mostly mostly hidden by Ekko’s oversized jacket and her hair, which she leans forward slightly to get to fall around her like a bell jar or a curtain like a shield, and she manages to slowly step down the stairs one at a time.

She lives on the second floor, she lives in the older, less-tread sector which is farther from the main area, so she needs to just get down this flight, make it the half-mile across public space, get to the river, change the filters without getting caught, and then do the whole thing in reverse.

Chompy squeals and squirms in her arms, tail slapping against her ribs and webbed paws wriggling as he has opinions on her squeezing too hard.

“Janna, I’m sorry-” Jinx immediately whispers, but she also holds his mouth shut. “We’re sneaking, so shh, but I won’t squeeze so tight again, okay? I don’t know how to hold a baby. My mom died when I was four and it never came up.”

That is very true. Janna, everyone better hope that she never has a kid, because she’d either kill it, jinx it, or create a small monster. Lucky for everyone, Jinx wasn’t planning on it, like, ever, which is good. She wouldn’t have as much time for work or animals or good things.

Jinx presses a kiss to Chompy’s nose, earning a happy squeal and kick from Chompy and disgruntled flapping from some of the birds, as she reaches the grassy floor and begins to limp, counting backwards from 1,032 in eights to calm herself as she walks in a beeline for the river.

1,024… 1,016… 1,008… 1,000… 992…

It’s halfway across the common space that it gets loud. People are talking, laughing, and Jinx realizes she’s made the fatal error of coming out during the normal Firelights’ lunchtime. She goes to raise her hands to cover her ears, too many voices overlapping and giving her more chest pains - an unfortunately common side effect of people - but she’s holding Chompy and can’t put him down because he doesn’t have a harness or leash and will make a break for it the second she releases him, so she just settles for walking as fast as physically possible, getting to the point where it’s just a weird shuffle as she tries to max out her speed, and though she hears a few people call her name from the usual eating area, she blocks it out, squeezing her eyes shut and burying her face in Ekko’s jacket as she starts literally running to the filter despite agony spiking up her legs as a result, the barely-healed bullet wounds and dislocations telling her to go fuck herself for trying it.

936… 928… 920…

Eventually, miraculously, Jinx manages to all but dive into the reeds that have cropped up around the filter, crouching low and going to pull the top off the machine and swap the filters when she realizes-

She brought the godsdamn borca. Which she can’t put down.

Jinx hesitates for a minute, looking down at Chompy, who excitedly trills and wriggles like he knows what she’s thinking, and after contemplating, she carefully flips him over and holds him over the ground with both hands wrapped around his belly and back. 

“Don’t run.” Jinx whispers. “Sit and stay. You’re a good boy.”

The second Chompy’s paws touch the grass and he’s no longer restrained, he is not, in fact, a good boy. His first order of business is to run for it in the opposite direction as fast as he can while faceplanting semi-regularly because he’s still a calf-slash-cub.

“Fuck.” Jinx tells the air, debating before whipping around to handle the filter. She quickly gets her fingernails underneath - she needs to cut them - and pries it off at the weak points that she needs to reinforce, yanking out both used filters so fast that coal and algae and grime get smeared on the cuff of the jacket. That makes her curse more than her under-breath chant of “shit, shit, fuck, motherfucker” that she has going, and she quickly just pops the replacements in, smacks the lid back onto the unit, and then gets to her feet and jogging for where Chompy is currently trying to catch a butterfly.

Unfortunately, that’s when her whole body just jolts with pain from trying to run, and Jinx doesn’t go down, but it’s close, making her keel over and pant for a minute. When she looks back up, Chompy isn’t there.

“No, no, no-” Jinx whispers, the panic building in her as she forces herself to stand again. Chompy’s still a baby, less than a week old, and he doesn’t know things are dangerous. He could- he could run into an exposed wire, or eat something bad, or someone could hurt him-

“Excuse me, miss?” a small voice asks. When Jinx freezes and her head involuntarily turns to look at the source, a little boy - he’s old enough to have teeth, Jinx knows nothing else about human children - with wide purple eyes, green hair, and dark brown skin, she realizes he’s holding Chompy - well, as best he can with a newborn borca frantically trying to lick his face. “Is this your puppy?”

Jinx forgets Common, Proper, South and East Corner, every single fucking language in her repertoire as she looks at the child. He doesn’t seem afraid, just patiently staring up at her while his small hands try to control the animal.

“He’s not a puppy.” Jinx finally chokes out, not even breathing as she stares at the child.

The child frowns. “He barked.”

“He does that when he gets happy. Or excited. Or scared. Or when he sees butterflies or anything new.” Jinx says.

The child finally stops staring right into her eyes like a little possessed demon, eyes instead going to her birds, still perched outside the shield of her hair. “You’re Miss Bird!”

“Who?” Jinx asks, brain still lagging a few minutes behind.

“You’re the bird lady!” the kid says, suddenly beaming. He tries to reach up to give her Chompy, but Chompy’s wriggling and heavy, so Jinx leans down to take him with a grimace. “You’re the- well, my dad says you’re the magic lady, but everyone in class calls you the bird lady! We really like your birds.”

He suddenly reaches up, and Jinx flinches on autopilot, but instead he grabs Ekko’s coat pocket and starts yanking. “Come on!”

Jinx wants to tell the child no, that she needs to go home now, but that would be mean. She doesn’t want to upset him.

She’s still in some weird state of confused-shocked-paralysis, because she lets him drag her, her pained legs stepping almost involuntarily.

“Where are we going?” she manages.

“All my friends draw pictures of you!” the child chatters. “We all really like your birds, and Emmie’s really happy because you made her a leg, and Charlie and Jessop are happy ‘cause you got rid of their asthma, and we all did stuff for you. I gave Mr. Ekko a cookie to give to you ‘cause I can’t draw. Did you get it? He doesn’t tell anyone where you live. He says you’ll come out when you’re ready to but I think he’s wrong ‘cause he said you were scared of people and my mom says you need to face your fears.”

Jinx is so preoccupied with the thought of Ekko talking about her to children that she forgets to think about anything else until she’s standing in a gaggle of children.

She only realizes when she does a head count - nearly forty children, ranging from tiny to almost-teenagers - that she’s made a massive fucking mistake as she gets swarmed.

There’s a chorus of voices as she’s surrounded on all sides by small humans, and her first instinct is to run, but not only is she blocked in by children, but her birds are excitedly cooing and Chompy is wriggling and visibly thrilled.

“I- I need to go-” Jinx tries, but a little girl with pigtails tugs on her jacket before hugging her leg as a chorus of ‘no’s and ‘please stay’s echo, and she freezes up again, letting some of the children practically drag her down. She somehow ends up sitting on the floor, Chompy still protectively hugged in her arms.

“Is that your puppy?”

“I don’t think it’s a puppy.”

“Can I hold a bird?”

“You look like a princess.”

Jinx still feels frozen until a child reaches out and pats Chompy, making her flinch before she starts processing again.

She’s in control of herself. She needs to stay calm. If she does, she won’t snap and hurt anyone. She’s not in danger - the Firelights won’t hurt her in front of kids and risk scaring them. The worst these small humans can do is say something cruel, and Janna knows that Jinx can take that, no problem.

“This is Chompy.” she finally manages to choke out. “He’s a bear-orca hybrid. He’s a baby - he was only born a few hours ago.”

There are some oohs and aahs from the younger kids, and a few of the older ones try to seem cool but are obviously staring with wide eyes, and after a second of contemplation, Jinx pretends to be Vi - nurturing and smart and strong and bossy.

Not Jinx, not the curse - Vi, the strong one, the good one, the protector.

Jinx pretends she’s channeling fifteen-year-old Vi instead of the traitor who only came after her to steal her work. The aging hurt stings, but she ignores it.

“Gather in a circle, okay?” Jinx says, shifting Chompy in her arms. “Press your knees to each other’s - we’re gonna make him a little circle so that he can run around and say hi without getting lost.”

The children scramble to obey, making a circle that’s surprisingly not-bad after a few tries, and after looking around and deeming it safe enough, Jinx releases Chompy with still-shaking hands.

He’s immediately bounding everywhere, doing his puppy-waddle-trot to waiting hands and immediately relishing in the attention, all panting tongue and teeth. He’s being patted, given belly rubs, having his nose smushed into palms and having his neck scratched where it’s half-disappeared underneath blubber and black-and-white fur.

“Can I hold a bird?” a child to Jinx’s left asks.

Jinx debates for a second before shuffling Burger down into her hands. “Here. Squish him like this- but be really gentle, okay? Like- like a sandwich. Be nice. If he pecks you or starts flapping his wings, let go. His name is Burger.”

The little girl who asked giggles as she takes Burger. “He’s so fat!”

“He is! He eats the others’ food. I have to hold him while they eat.” Jinx says, and she can’t help but smile a little.

A second later, some more kids get up from the circle - the little girl that Chompy is currently clambering all over holds him tight so he doesn’t escape, which Jinx appreciates - and come over with overlapping requests.

“Can I hold the pink bird?”

“I wanna see the brown one!”

Almost in a daze, Jinx starts to hand them each bird individually to distribute around the circle, telling them to be careful. Grenade, the big scaredy, stays in her lap and Jinx keeps a close eye on Pompom to make sure that her grouchy, mean, prideful little pink bird doesn’t pick a fight with a child.

“How did you tame them?” one kid asks, a little bit older than Jinx was when she was Powder, staring at Vanilla-bean, sitting politely on his finger and singing. “They’re amazing. Did you buy them Topside from a- a breeder, I think they’re called? How did you get Chompy?”

“No, I- I didn’t tame them or buy them. I made them.” Jinx says.

“Whaddya mean?” one boy with a smudge of dirt on his cheek asks.

“I’m a bioengineer.” Jinx says.

Nobody reacts, and Jinx realizes that they probably don’t understand what that means. “So… I build things. I made the electricity happen and made a machine to make the water clean, and I made a lot of replacement arms and legs out of metal, right? Well, I make living things too.”

“How?” the kid holding Vanilla-bean asks.

“So… I like to code. I do computer algorithms - like, the code that makes the computer work - but I do genetic coding too. I type in letters, and the computer uses them as… well, like building blocks. I write the letters, and the computer turns it into the code that makes living things happen. I built a printer that makes organic stuff like bones and blood and muscle and stuff, and when I use the building blocks and tell the computer to print, it makes the animals. I make plants and body parts, too, but the animals are my favorite.”

“That’s so cool!” one boy breathes as another calls out, “Can you make a dragon?!”

“It’s just science, and, uh… I could theoretically make a dragon, but he’d be really small-”

Jinx is suddenly attacked by a child, one practically lunging at her, and her shoulders hit her ears again from where they’ve relaxed, but the child, looking like she’s maybe six, is just hugging her, arms squeezing tight around her waist.

“I need a unicorn.” the little girl says, turning to look up at her with big, serious eyes. “I don’t care if it’s small. I need a unicorn. Can you make one if you can make a dragon?”

“A unicorn should be really easy, actually.” Jinx says, almost automatic as she stares at the little girl, whole body still tense. She has big brown eyes that remind her of little Ekko. “I’d just need to change the horse building blocks to have another horn and a curlier coat and to be friendly and stuff.”

The little girl squeals, burying her face in Jinx’s chest. “Can I have it for my birthday?”

“Uh… sure.” Jinx says, still not sure how to handle the child clinging to her. 

“Thankyouthankyouthankyou!”

“So… you made the plants?” one of the older kids asks.

Jinx nods. “Uh… yeah. About nine hundred now, plus crops.”

“So everything that’s changed with the air and water being cleaner and there being lights and there being more food and people getting new limbs and stuff… that’s all you?” the kid asks.

Jinx nods again, this time more slowly, trying to make eye contact with the older kid for a second before having to look away. “Yeah. I… I’m really good at building things, and it, uh… the terraforming wasn’t too hard…”

“You’re amazing.” the boy with Vanilla-bean gasps, and next thing Jinx knows, the children are clamoring again, this time with praise.

“My mama can walk!”

“The water tastes good!”

“You saved my grandpa!”

“Your birds are so pretty!”

“You’re like a magician!”

“I’m not magic.” Jinx says weakly, getting overwhelmed and barely resisting the urge to flap her hands. “I’m just a scientist.”

Another small child hugs around her neck, and it makes something warm crack open in her chest, but it also makes her nervous, so she starts talking. “It’s- it’s really just science. Biology and math and code and engineering and a bit of welding. It’s- it’s not magic unless you count the HexCore.”

The children are chattering amongst themselves about the animals and plants and inventions now, and Jinx gets a blissful moment of nobody talking directly to her even though there’s two children who have to be under the age of six clinging to her until one of the older kids pipes up.

“We’ve just been calling you Miss Bird. What’s your real name?” he asks. “I’m Jax.”

Jinx winces internally. With how much Ekko calls her Trouble, she hasn’t been called her name out loud in a while, and just like when she was alone for a long time or when Silco called her petnames instead of ‘Jinx’ for too long, the name stings.

“My name is Jinx.” she says quietly. “Nice to meet you.”

“What does that mean?” the little girl hugging her waist asks as she shifts to lay with her head on Jinx’s thigh, making her leg tense involuntarily.

“Uh- Jinx means curse. It’s a way of saying that something is really bad. For me, my name means that I ruin everything I touch. It’s like… it means an evil spell or something that brings bad luck. Something you want to get rid of.”

It’s quiet for a minute except for bird cooing and Chompy’s squealing, and Jinx curses herself for telling the truth.

“That’s a really mean name.” the little girl on her thigh sniffs. “‘Specially for a really nice lady.”

And just like that, the world stops.

Jinx hasn’t been ‘nice.’ Ever. When she was little and wouldn’t hurt insects and would walk on tiptoes for fear of stepping on any, she would get called weak and dumb by Mylo. When she didn’t want to hurt people as Jinx, she was childish and soft. When she did want to hurt people as Jinx, she was cruel and monstrous.

She has never been nice.

Why do they think that she is? Did she do something right?

When Jinx looks up, peeking through the curtain of her hair that still surrounds her, she sees people watching from the dining area, but none look mad or upset. Most of them are smiling.

They don’t hate her.

They don’t hate her?

Nobody’s tried to hurt her since she’s come down. The kids have been talking to her and playing with Chompy and her birds. Some of them have been hugging her.

They don’t hate her. Kids usually aren’t that good of liars.

She carefully dislodges the child leaning against her back and the one on her leg, standing on shaky feet. “Chompy, baby, c’mere.”

He dutifully rises and trots over, tongue poking out, and she scoops him up as she whistles, the birds immediately responding and landing on her.

“Aw, why are you leaving?” one of the older kids asks.

“Yeah, stay!”

“I- I have to go. I’ll be back later. Maybe. Goodbye.” Jinx manages to stammer as she turns and flees.

-

She probably moves a little bit fast when she gets back into her room, because she accidentally hip-checks the door so hard that it slams before she plops Chompy on the bed like a sack of potatoes and beelines for the bathroom fast enough that her birds flutter indignantly before she remembers to put them back in the cage and grab some scissors from her work bench.

She hasn’t had a great relationship with the small, cracked mirror over the sink. While she hasn’t had a punch-it-until-she-bleeds-and-shoot-it-with-a-gun episode like she used to, she doesn’t like looking in it, both because the pure idea of a mirror makes her feel anxious and uneasy for a minute because she can’t help but imagine something crawling out of it and because she just looks wrong. Too skinny and too heavy at the same time, too scared and shy but too Jinx-

But that’s part of why she stares at her reflection.

She doesn’t quite look like Jinx anymore. Her eyes don’t look dead or crazy, just large and blue plus the thick glasses over them. Her face is still Jinx’s face, but her cheeks are slightly rounder and she has more freckles and is no longer so pale - looking back, Jinx realizes that must have been, at least in part, because she was so hopped up on opioids. Her hair is still neon blue and dragging on the floor, thick enough that it can cover her entirely, but it’s no longer in the braids that Silco did for her.

Silco didn’t let her cut her hair.

She could have, technically, just like she technically could have left her room and his office and the Last Drop. He never outright told her she couldn’t.

But she still remembers when she tried to cut it for the last time.

Jinx is thirteen, and it’s been almost five years since she cut her hair. It shows - instead of the to-the-bottom-of-her-shoulder-blades braid she’s always preferred, her hair brushes her hips when she takes it out of the braids that Silco insists on doing every morning to spend time with her.

So, one day when she’s in Silco’s office and tinkering and reading and chatting from the couch while he does work before braiding her hair, she says, “Can we cut my hair today?”

Silco doesn’t look up from the document he’s looking over, but his pen stills. “Why would we do that, my dear?”

“It’s too long.” Jinx admits, messing with the bomb in her lap. “It gets in the way, and it takes forever to wash, and it gets tangled in my sleep, and-”

“We braid it so it’s out of the way, Jinx, and if it gets that tangled, we’ll get you silk sheets.” Silco says, setting his pen down and sitting up straighter to look at her.

“Just a trim! Just to, like, the bottom of my ribs-”

“No.” Silco cuts off.

Jinx blinks. “What?”

“I said no, Jinx.” Silco says. “Your hair is beautiful, and it’s part of who you are.”

“But it’s just hair, it’ll grow back-”

“It’s not ‘just’ anything.” His voice is firm but calm, which somehow makes it worse. “Your hair makes you distinctive. Recognizable. It’s part of your image, part of your identity, part of what makes you Jinx. Would you cut off your fingers because they get in the way sometimes?”

Jinx shifts uncomfortably. “That’s different.”

“Is it? Both are parts of you that are very important.” Silco says coolly before his tone softens again. “Come here, child.”

Jinx gets up, setting the bomb down and tugging on her fingers as she walks over, hair falling into her face. As soon as she walks over and perches on his desk, his fingers are gently running through her hair.

“Did you know that hair holds memories?” he murmurs, almost reverent as he continues to card it through his fingers. “After your mother died, I didn’t cut my hair for months trying to hold onto the memories of her. I ended up cutting it after a bad dream and immediately regretting it, because it meant I lost one of the last things I had from when she was alive.”

His hand stops going through her hair, migrating to her cheek. Jinx leans into the touch automatically, rubbing her cheek against his palm and closing her eyes like one of the street cats she feeds behind his back.

“You’d regret it, sweetheart.” Silco says softly. “If you cut your hair, you’d lose everything you had left of Vander and your brothers and sister. You’d lose them - dishonor them. And you would hate yourself for that for the rest of your life, I promise you.”

Jinx wants to start crying. She doesn’t want to dishonor them - she just wants to not feel tangled. She ends up sliding off the desk and ending up mostly in his lap, thin thighs thrown across his legs and her face in his shoulder.

“I don’t want to dishonor them.” Jinx whispers. “I want to remember them.”

“Then you can’t cut your hair.” Silco says, pressing a kiss to her temple before returning to running his hands through it. “Not ever. But that’s quite alright. Your hair is perfect.”

Jinx sniffs, trying not to cry. “How?”

“Well, it suits you. It makes you look beautiful. It might be just because your hair is beautiful, but it makes you look perfect. Like one of the girls from folklore.” Silco says. Jinx focuses on his breathing so she doesn’t cry. “It’s long, yes, but it’s very thick and soft and such a lovely color, and it makes you look both like someone out of a dream and a warning.”

He presses another kiss to her head. “Perfect. My perfect girl.”

Jinx never tries to cut it again, even when it gets to be over seven feet long and almost painful.

She misses him. She hates that she misses him so much that her chest hurts. She hates that she still loves him. She hates him. She still tears up at the thought of him.

But he betrayed her. He sent her into danger, to her death, knowingly. He fed her drugs that made her sick. He made her into a monster.

Jinx forces herself to take a deep breath, raising the scissors.

She can love him and still not see him. In the end, even if going back was an option, Jinx thinks she’d choose to stay with Ekko. And sure, she wishes she could see him, but… well, she’s surviving. She’s becoming something more than his weapon and his perfect little girl. She can breathe and walk straight and see. And that’s worth more than fixing the ache from being away from her father.

Jinx goes to chop her hair at her jaw, then rethinks, lowering it to her hips, then raising it to her waist. It’s still almost her entire height in hair going if she cuts it at her waist - that’s a good length, right?

She hesitates, then raises it a bit higher and makes the first chop around the bottom of her chest.

She freezes, staring at herself in the mirror as her hair curls slightly to the left, clearly suddenly missing the lower five feet that is now in a puddle on the floor.

Nothing happens.

She doesn’t forget Vander or Vi or Mylo or Claggor. She doesn’t suddenly become ugly or have shadows in the mirror scream at her. Silco doesn’t appear and stare at her in disappointment and horror.

Nothing happens.

Jinx makes another cut.

And another.

And another.

She stops when her hair is in a massive mound, and she sets down the scissors and goes to step backwards and away, but she gets dizzy and has to lean against the sink.

It occurs to her that she feels so strange because she just lost five feet of hair, and her entire center of gravity just changed.

Jinx tilts her head to one side, then the other, then forward, then she shakes it and starts giggling.

She feels so damn light, like she’ll float away. After she gets a little less dizzy, Jinx raises her hands to run them through her so-much-shorter hair, and it’s in that moment she realizes she fucked up.

Her mom cut her hair when she was little, and then Vander trimmed it once a year, and she stopped cutting it at eight, but those factors come together to mean that Jinx does not, in fact, know how to cut hair.

“Oh, no.” Jinx whispers in mild horror as she realizes that some pieces are almost three inches longer than others and ninety percent of the cuts are crooked. “Oh, fuck.”

She looks in the mirror and realizes that while yes, she does look different and somehow better, she also seriously fucked up her hair.

“Oh, Janna, no-” Jinx whispers, raking her fingers through it and trying to think of how to somehow salvage this. She doesn’t know that many people, and most of them would probably take this as either something really funny (Jamie) or really worrying (Ekko and Jem)-

…Nilah.

‘I’m an artist. Ekko and I painted most of the memorial wall together. Anything painted, I do that. Anything clothing or looks, I make that. I made the sweater and leggings you’re wearing, actually. If you want anything new, I could take care of that for you. Makeover.’

Hair is part of that, right? Well, Nilah’s hair is gorgeous, so she can probably help at least a little bit-

Jinx remembers the instructions that Jem gave to her room when she was trying to coax her to go make friends with ‘one of the few girls her age and definitely one of the friendliest,’ and after quickly going over and pressing a kiss to Chompy’s fuzzy cheek as he tries to lick her, she’s out the door, putting up the hood on Ekko’s jacket.

Janna, she needs help.

-

When she knocks on Nilah’s door (labeled ‘stylist’ and ‘designer’ - before she somehow ended up here, Not-Jinx would never have guessed they had a stylist in the Firelights), shifting nervously from foot-to-foot, the door swings open before she can knock again.

Nilah’s eyes widen, then crinkle into a smile, then widen again as she sees Jinx’s hair.

“Honey, oh my God.” she breathes. “What happened to your head?”

Not-Jinx cringes. “...existential crisis plus engineering scissors?”

“Well, that’ll do it. Get in here. I can fix it.” Nilah says, grabbing Not-Jinx’s bicep and dragging her inside, kicking the door shut behind her. “What happened, exactly?”

Not-Jinx tries to find the words behind it as Nilah gets out a pair of (much smaller and more refined) scissors.

“I’m not Jinx.” she finally manages. “I don’t want to be, anyway.”

Nilah hums as she comes back, already taking one of the too-long pieces and cutting it as Jinx still just stays standing in the middle of the room. “Well, I’m glad to hear that, considering the common connotation around ‘Jinx’ around here. Who are you?”

Not-Jinx blinks. “I don’t know. I need to find a new name.”

“Ooh, makeover time. I see how it is.” Nilah says, standing behind her as she snips away at what’s left of Not-Jinx’s hair. “Well, lucky for you, I love doing makeovers.”

Not-Jinx almost shifts, but then realizes she doesn’t want Nilah to screw up her hair, so she stays still. “I, uh- I just need to fix my hair.”

“Aw, come on! We have to celebrate! Jinx is dead, you’re a whole new person - or old, if you go back to Powder again - and we should have a little fun! Besides, you left your room! You left your room, Jinx-not-Jinx, and that’s practically a cause for fireworks-”

“No fireworks.” Not-Jinx says quickly, her fear of loud noises kicking in.

“-alright, no fireworks, but still! I can make you wear a little makeup, make you try on a few outfits - I’m a stylist, it’s, like, half my job, and besides, you’re gorgeous and you’ve been hiding it underneath sweaters and hair and Ekko’s jacket. Which, personally, I’d recommend you keep-” Nilah chops a bit more “-have you seen him when you wear it?”

Not-Jinx blinks in surprise as Nilah just keeps cutting her hair. “Uh. No?”

“So, not sure if you’re aware, but you’re already a bit of a heartthrob. So during dinner - which, by the way, was over a month ago, shame on you for not hanging out with us, we actually like you - I don’t know if you noticed, but Davi was totally checking you out.”

Not-Jinx freezes. “What.”

“Oh, yeah. To be fair, he has a weakness for smart girls - I think it’s because he’s kind of an idiot, so he’s subconsciously trying to find someone to balance him out - but yeah, he was totally trying to flirt. I think Zeke would have if he weren’t gay as hell, but Davi and Ekko are definitely into you.”

“What.” she repeats.

“Oh yeah. His pupils dilate whenever you’re wearing the coat or you smile, and his face gets super soft when you’re around, which is kind of weird because he’s such a hardass.”

Not-Jinx’s brain breaks, so she finds the incorrect part automatically. “Ekko’s not a hardass. He’s really gentle.”

“That’s because Ekko is a different Ekko with you, honey.” Nilah laughs as she pockets the scissors, running her hands through Not-Jinx’s hair and shaking and fluffing it. “With us, he’s nice but also a stickler for the rules and really snarky and antisocial. Your Ekko, though, he’s a completely different person. He’d kill someone if you asked him, and he’s super touchy with you where he avoids everyone else, and he smiles more around you in one dinner than he does in a month without you. Plus, he’s been ignoring everyone when he’s not busy leader-ing to hang out with you, which says a lot. Boy’s definitely at least a little in love with you.”

Not-Jinx’s brain breaks, and she just stares blankly at the wall as she tries and fails to process and tries and fails to ignore how her palms are suddenly sweaty and her heart is suddenly beating too fast.

“Anyway, you should definitely keep wearing the coat, because it’s actually really adorable that you do and drives Ekko at least a little crazy.”

Not-Jinx doesn’t know what to say, just continuing to stare off before she croaks, “Ekko’s not in love with me.”

“Hmm.” Nilah says, like she’s disagreeing but also not going to fight for it. “How do you like your hair? Come look.”

Not-Jinx is herded in front of the mirror, and her brain breaks further.

“Your hair is gorgeous, by the way.” Nilah says, standing behind Not-Jinx and pulling it back behind her ears. “It’s super soft and thick and you have this gorgeous blue that I wish I could pull off. Plus it’s actually naturally wavy, which kinda got hidden because it was so long. If you want, I can make it shorter.”

Not-Jinx stares at herself in some kind of shock, taking in how different she looks with shorter hair. It’s still not short, about halfway down her bicep, but it looks so different. Somehow, it looks thicker now that it’s shorter, curling up at the ends a little bit, and Jinx actually thinks she looks…

She looks nice.

Not-Jinx touches her hair lightly, still hardly blinking, and Nilah grins. “So this is a yes?”

“Thank you.” Not-Jinx breathes.

“Now all we have to do is your makeup and clothes.”

That snaps Not-Jinx out of her focus. “What?”

“Come on! New hairstyle, new name, new you! Besides, I’m a stylist - I have to have some fun with you!”

“I already know how to do makeup.” Not-Jinx says hastily. “Like, eyeliner and eyeshadow. Silco taught me. You don’t have to do my makeup.”

That makes Nilah pause. “Wait. The whole Wannabe-King-of-Zaun taught you how to do eyeliner?”

“...yeah?” Jinx says awkwardly.

Nilah stares off for a minute before she starts grinning again. “Godsdamn, that’s a great mental image. Anyway, stay right there - I’m gonna find you some clothes. What size are you?”

Not-Jinx doesn’t answer, preoccupied with watching Nilah go over and start rifling through what’s practically a wall of boxes she’s turned on their sides, full of clothes and shoes and stuff.

“I’m actually technically an armorer.” Nilah says as she digs through. “I just also like fashion. I joined to make sure everyone had good armor that fit, then when the Sanctuary got big, I was allowed to do people’s hair and makeup and give the civilian Firelights clothes and everything. Then, when Ekko realized I also liked to design rooms, he had me start to go in after the construction task force and make it all pretty and organized.”

“Do you do Ekko’s dreads?” Not-Jinx asks, the thought just occurring. “And- wait, did you do my room?”

“I helped with your room, but Ekko’s hair- pff. No. He only lets my mom touch his head. She’s literally the only person allowed to redo the dreads. It’s really cute, actually - he gets all grumpy but he sits super quietly between her legs like he’s a little kid while she fixes them up.”

Not-Jinx tries to imagine Ekko being grumpy about his hair and can’t picture it. She’s only really seen him patient and gentle and tired except for when he learned that someone hurt her and looked ready to murder someone and when he looked scared upon seeing her deer. Plus the excitement when they play-fight or she starts chattering excitedly and they turn into a feedback loop of happiness.

“Take off the jacket?” Nilah says, but it’s phrased like a question. “I can’t tell what size you are.”

Not-Jinx immediately feels self-conscious, but she takes off the jacket anyway, reluctantly setting it on a nearby chair.

“Are you wearing three sweaters right now?” Nilah asks incredulously.

She shrinks. “I’m cold, and the weight is comforting.”

“Right. Autism.” Nilah says, nodding to herself. “Can you ditch the top two for a minute? Can hardly tell you have a body with that many.”

She feels even more self-conscious, but she obeys, leaving her in the thinnest sweater - a pale pink one that’s crocheted and hole-y from her wearing it when using heat and welding on prosthetics - and with her arms crossed over her chest awkwardly.

Nilah looks, squinting and looking her torso up-and-down before turning back to the boxes. “You take a compliment?”

Not-Jinx hesitates. “...sure?”

Nilah wolf-whistles, and Not-Jinx starts giggling at the pure absurdity of leaving her room and chopping off all her hair and now getting made over by this random cheerful nineteen-year-old who’s apparently 100% cool with wolf-whistling at her.

“Okay, so I’m gonna start you off easy because you’re clearly not used to wearing anything other than a stupid amount of layers.” Nilah says as Not-Jinx keeps giggling, the sound bubbling up uncontrollably, making her fall a bit to sit on the chair that Ekko’s jacket is on just to keep balance as her hands start flapping happily. “Just jeans and a Henley and some boots, maybe a little jewelry or a sweater or something. I’ll bring the rest of the stuff to your room later.”

Not-Jinx still hasn’t stopped giggling, and she can't stop pumping her hands in happiness. She feels too light, like she’s going to float away.

Maybe her hair did hold memories, but she cut off the bad ones instead of all of them.

“You sound like you feel good.” Nilah says, plopping some clothes into Not-Jinx’s lap with a smile. “You look good. Happiness suits you.”

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? She feels happy.

She feels free.

Chapter Text

By the time that Not-Jinx wanders back to her room, she’s ready to stare at herself in the mirror like her birds do when they have access to water or a reflective surface like when she leaves the door open to the bathroom (a bunch of little narcissists, she swears, because they all just sit and stare at themselves, silly babies), in part because she feels good about how she looks and in part because she doesn’t recognize herself. Gods, she feels like she’s floating. She’s probably lost half her body weight in hair, and she hasn’t had her hair this short since she was nine, and if that weren’t enough, she feels like herself.

Logically, she knows that if there were any memories in her hair like Silco said there were, what she has left probably holds some of the worse ones. The hair she has now would have grown in the past two years, which means it holds the majority of her suicide attempts, the majority of her kills, pain and isolation and being a monster - hells, it literally would have drugs in the keratin. Her hair, even if it doesn’t hold memories, holds the reminder that she was drugged to the gills because the keratin literally contains the drugs her body couldn’t absorb.

But it also holds the last few months. Months of her birds and plants and animals, of Ekko, of Chompy, of Jem, of learning people like her, of doing good for the first time in her life.

She’ll cut her hair soon. Eventually, the drugs will grow out, and her hair will be just plain keratin, no traces of the shit that were in her system. Eventually, the memories will grow out, and it’ll just be good things and helpfulness and her.

She has a chance. She legitimately has a chance to do something good, a shot at happiness, an opportunity to make herself something - someone - good, who has friends other than pigeons and someone who wanders around the home she terraformed and who helps the people who need clean air and water and good food and medical care.

And not to mention, she feels really pretty.

It’s shallow, she knows, but Nilah pulled what’s left of her hair back into this neat little style where she has her hair in a braid that’s been pinned to her head in a circle like a crown, a few locks loose around her face, and she’s wearing this really nice burgundy long-sleeve shirt that’s heavy but not suffocating, and it’s tucked into the jeans she’s wearing - something Silco disapproved of because he said they made her look like she was trying to get too much attention and that they made her look too thin - and these really good leather lace-up boots, and she’s still wearing her big black glasses, and she just… feels pretty. She hasn’t had that in… ever, she thinks.

Not-Jinx pulls her key out from the pocket she had it in and unlocks her door with the hand with her three bad fingers still in the steel splints she made for herself, two flat pieces of metal up her fingers but with hinges letting them bend at the knuckles and with thin bands around the lower and upper halves of each finger. (She’s working on some for her legs and one for her worse arm too, as they all ache constantly and sting when she moves too much.)

As soon as she’s inside, she’s immediately swarmed by birds and a very enthusiastic day-old bear-orca, even her bugs becoming active and flitting around their terrariums at the sight of her.

“Hey, babies!” Not-Jinx beams as she holds out her arms, letting them perch on her as Chompy chitters and squeals, hopping around so much that he literally bowls himself over onto his side, though he recuperates fast. She scoffs at him, getting down to the floor with a groan and scooping him up into her arms like a baby before standing back up. “You’re such a silly boy, you little chunk-ball, oh, you’re such a good boy-”

Her birds finish landing on her, some trying to preen her ears or hair and others just happily settling, and Not-Jinx giggles as Chompy tries to lick her chin and she spins in a circle. She laughs harder when she looks over at her desk and sees that one of her newer designs - a massive rhinoceros beetle that eats rotten food, even when it’s hard to detect, and who really likes opening his own container - is trying to drag away one of her spools of thread and failing.

(Okay, sue her. She has beetles now. She’s been busy. Ekko had her pin up a big piece of butcher paper next to her desk and write down what she’s made and what’s ready to go in different pens, and the list is long-

‘ Mechanical: HexTech generator, water purifier unit, high-capacity computer, neural 132pdb flashdrives, 3D organic printer, trench system

Living - all w/ optional modifications:
Birds - Pigeons, leaf warblers, magpies, lovebirds

Bugs - Crickets, glow moths, silkworms, tarantulas, butterflies (morpho, red admiral, burnet), moths (atlas, owlet, luna, box tree), bumblebees, stickbugs, cockroaches, termites, beetles (rhinocerous, scarab)

Mammals - Bear-orcas, cervinid predators, 8-leg bears & dogs, rats (the cervinid predators and 8-leg bears & dogs are crossed out by Ekko with a frowny face written over them, which make her smile)

Plants - Snake plant, areca palm, cactus, pothos, sweet potato vines, peace lilies, ferns, mosses, modified tomatoes, modified potatoes, modified wheat, modified squash

People - all customized:

Prosthetics - any needed, working on organic limbs

Organs & organic parts - hearts, kidneys, livers, lungs, stomach, stomach, skin, etc (everything but brains & eyes, do NOT ask for them)

-but it doesn’t matter right now because she’s happy. She’s happy.)

Not-Jinx carefully shifts Chompy over to one arm with a grunt, walking over and tapping the beetle - his name is Hercules - on his carapace as he freezes, like he knows he’s been caught red-handed.

“You get no thread because when you get thread you get tangled and then sulk forever and I have to untangle you forever.” Not-Jinx says, tapping him lightly a few more times before she tries to take the thread spool, which gets him fighting her on it, his horn hooking through the center of the spool as he starts trying to walk backwards. “No- no- Herc, Herc, buddy- come on, this isn’t a negotiation-”

The beetle’s legs dig in like this is the most important battle of his life and he has a fighting chance, and Not-Jinx starts giggling as Peter starts tugging on a lock of her hair and Chompy wriggles like a maniac and Hercules won’t let go of the damn thread, even buzzing in protest.

“I will give you a banana-” Not-Jinx giggles as she tries to take it off him. He buzzes harder, turns around, and scuttles back to his cage despite her attempts to block him, and he rolls over to knock the spool off his horn on his leaf bedding before he scuttles over and closes the door. “You little shit!”

She carefully sets Chompy on the floor (he immediately is trotting off to try to drag his pillow over to her, the little cutie) before she goes over and starts trying to open the door without hurting a certain beetle, who’s currently holding the door shut with his horn. “Come on, you little-”

The door bursts open, sending Not-Jinx’s birds scattering and her heart racing as she whips around, grabbing the scalpel off her desk and pointing it at the intruders before she can blink, though she relaxes slightly when she recognizes the silhouette in the doorway. “Ekko?”

Her shoulders hit her ears again, fast enough that the six pigeons riding on her shoulders like she’s a wire start cooing, when she sees him, immediately limping over as fast as she can.

Ekko’s eyes are blown wide and unfocused, and his face is a mess, a wide, near-black cut running from his hairline to the tip of his nose, blood seeping from the space between poorly-applied butterfly bandages. His eyes are already swelling and turning black from bruising, and he’s visibly unwell.

“Oh my gods- Ekko! Ekko, focus on me.” Not-Jinx says fast, herding him over to her desk chair by the elbow and moving her finger in front of his eyes back-and-forth. “Follow my finger. Do you feel dizzy? Nauseous? Do you feel pressure behind your eyes? Are you hallucinating?”

Ekko doesn’t follow her finger. In fact, as she gets him sitting in the chair and kneels in front of him, he just stares at her. After a moment, both of his hands come up and cradle her cheeks like something precious, thumbs gently running over her cheekbones, and his eyes are locked on her like he’s never seen her before.

“Did I get hit in the face harder than I thought, or did you…” Ekko slurs slightly, eyes soft despite what’s clearly a bad concussion. “You look so different…”

“I cut my hair, yeah.” Not-Jinx says, trying not to turn red as Nilah’s words play in her head about Ekko having a crush on her. “Focus.”

He doesn’t, his hand just migrating upwards to run over her braid. “You look so beautiful… Gods, you’re so beautiful, look at you…”

Not-Jinx flushes almost violently, her brain malfunctioning for a second, her face and ears so red that her face is on fire. “Wow, you are really concussed. Seriously, do you have any other symptoms? Have you seen Jem yet?”

“I have. She said it was a concussion and a skull fracture and broken nose and that I’d be fine. Your freckles look like a sky…” Ekko says, releasing her cheeks to run his fingers over the smattering on her cheeks. “Mon étoile, mon soleil, ma lumière… Tu es l'étoile la plus brillante de mon cœur…”

Not-Jinx forgets to breathe, both at the fact that Ekko is apparently waxing poetic (‘my star, my sun, my light, you are the brightest star in my heart,’ what the fuck) and that he’s waxing it in fucking Proper, which is a language that he does not speak even if she does.

She can’t help but stare at him, mouth parted, frozen in place as he brushes his knuckles down her cheek with a gentleness that makes her heart stop. “I… uh…”

She shakes her head, gently taking his hands to pull them away from her face as she tries to pull her brain back from being scrambled. Even when she speaks, though, she’s still flustered. “Since, uh… since when do you speak, uh, Proper? Because if you’re suddenly speaking Proper and you never learned it, that’s, uh, a really rare phenomenon that’s been recorded in injuries to, uh, the brain, it’s called Foreign Accent Syndrome and, uh, aphasia-”

Ekko smiles, thankfully not lopsided - at least he’s not hemorrhaging or stroking - and slurs, “I started learning it because you speak and sing in it when you’re not thinking. Thought you’d be impressed.”

Not-Jinx is going to keel the fuck over. She’s blushing so hard that her whole neck and upper chest feel hot.

This is not helped by the fact that he grins wider at her and slurs, “Was it worth it?”

Not-Jinx can’t do anything but choke out random syllables as she fumbles for the right drawer in her desk to deal with the cut. She’ll have to go find someone to get some ice, put it on his head, try to get the swelling of both his skin and his frontal lobe down - the concussion is grade-two in his frontal lobe, that’s why he’s being far too suave and romantic, he’s lost some control over his rationality and behavior and is having a temporary personality change-

She’s mumbling nonsense to herself trying to calm and cool down, her whole upper body red and hot - literally, her hands are pink - as she goes for gauze and sutures, but someone else walks into the room, making her shoulders hit her ears and her whole body go completely still, automatically freezing at the potential threat.

“Easy there, Blue, just making sure lover boy over there actually got here and told you that we need you in the hospital.” another voice - Scar, she thinks? She’s only met him when he pokes his head in to summon Ekko for leader things when he’s hanging out with her - says gently, like he’s trying not to scare her. “Did he?”

“No.” Not-Jinx manages, looking back over her shoulder at him. “What’s up?”

“A patrol went missing. They got captured and tortured by some enemies. We need you to make some organs and limbs.” Scar says simply. “Six injured. Needed according to Jem: Zionne, one arm and two legs. Sori, skin and muscle if you have time. Kael, two arms, two legs, skin and muscle. Emmlah has a brainstem bleed, she’s already dead, don’t worry about her. Chess and Ronin need two arms, a lung, an artery, livers and kidneys, and a foot.”

What? Wait, what? No. No, no, no, she can’t do this.

Nope. Never mind. Not-Jinx is in her lovely freeze response again.

“I- I can’t.” she manages, fear choking out the warmth from Ekko’s flirting. “My printer wouldn’t be fast enough-”

“Jem and the rest of the hospital can buy you time.” he says, walking over, shutting the printer tray, and picking it up. Not-Jinx automatically makes a noise of protest as he unplugs it. “Get what you need and let’s go.”

“You don’t understand. Muscle and skin are the easiest, and it takes me five minutes per square inch for skin and two inches per inch for muscle to print onto the body. Let alone- a full leg, a full arm, it would take half an hour, and that’s if I rush- organs, each maybe twenty minutes- I’ll break the printer-”

Powder- no, Jinx, Jinx, Mister Silco named her Jinx, she’s Jinx now- is on her first job. She’s thirteen. She feels… weird. She’s heavy, wrapped in three layers of armor - leather, chainmail, and plate - and she can hardly put her arms down, let alone see out of the helmet that Mister Silco had her wear. She’s holding two guns - well, one, really, the gun she built is in her pocket and she’s holding a machine gun because Sevika said her gun would break once she tried to use it. (Which Jinx resents.)

She’s practiced. She’s practiced fistfighting with Sevika hundreds of times, and practiced with Vi and Ekko and Mylo and Claggor before that (killed them killed them KILLED THEM-) and practiced shooting a ton before Mister Silco would send her on a job.

But this feels so different from a target when she shoots blindly at one of the enemy soldiers. She closes her eyes, but she hears his scream anyway, and when she opens her eyes again, he’s crawled out into the hallway outside the living room where the rest of the soldiers are. Jinx’s knees are practically giving out as she walks out, following him into the hallway where she can’t hear the sound of Sevika and the three other soldiers that Mister Silco sent with her killing the family of the Chembaron who got in the way.

He’s dragging himself away, but by the time she’s managed to raise her gun and point it at him, he’s rolled over, leaning half-against-the-wall and panting as raising his hands in surrender.

“Don’t- please, please don’t-” he gasps, looking at her and squinting for a second. He looks young, too, maybe nineteen or twenty. “I’m- I’m Mikkin. I’m Mikkin. What’s your name? I’m- hhngh, I’m twenty, how old are you?”

Jinx feels frozen, her hand shaking like crazy as she tries to get the words out. “I’m- I’m Pow- Jinx. Jinx. I’m thirteen.”

“Thirteen. Thirteen. Jinx, that’s- that’s not right for a little- hngh, gods, I can’t feel my legs.” Mikkin pants for a minute, leaning his head back and baring a bloodied throat before he looks back at her and keeps speaking. “I’m just- I’m gonna call you Jay, okay? That’s- that’s nicer for a little girl.”

“I’m not little.” Jinx says automatically, shifting her grip on the machine gun. It hurts her wrists. She doesn’t want to hold it anymore.

“No. No, of course not, you’re- fuck, fuck- oh, you’re big. You’re big. You’re right.” Mikkin says, holding one hand out further. “You’re big. A- a good shot. They must all be proud of you. You- fuck- you hit my spine, I think. You’re a good shot, you did good, you did good, they must all be proud of you! They must be so proud!”

Jinx feels frozen as he sobs, his green eyes wide as he keeps looking at her. “They must love you so much. Good shot, you look- hngh, fuck- you look cute, even through the mask, you’re a cute kid- augh, fuck-”

He pants for another minute. Jinx doesn’t move. Her whole arms are shaking under the gun.

“You- you remind me of my little sister. Her name is Vire. She’s- augh- nine. Nine. I’m- I’m not gonna hurt you, okay, Jay? You’re so big, you’re so strong, look at you-”

Jinx isn’t sure if it’s the armor that’s making her knees buckle or how her vision is whiting out a little around the edges as she looks at the blood.

(She remembers going back in to find Mylo and Claggor’s bodies ‘cause she wanted to bury them, she remembers the blood, she remembers screaming until Silco had to press a cloth over her mouth to make her stop and breathe again-)

“I’m- I’m not gonna hurt you, okay, birdie? I’m just- hngh- I’m- if you help me- I just need to get to my sister’s bedroom, it’s six doors down- please, just leave us alone, we’ll be quiet, we’ll leave you alone- please, please, just- augh, fuck- just let me get to the nursery, please, I’ll- you want this?”

He reaches one of his seizing hands into the pocket of his oversized jacket and starts pulling things out. Two knives, both well-forged. A stuffed poro the size of her palm. A candy bar. “Do you want this? You- fuck- you can have it, okay, Jay? You can have all of it. I’ll- I can find you money to give to whoever you’re working for. Or- or if you want to escape. I just- fuck- I just need you to pretend not to see me for a few minutes, okay? I just need you to pretend I’m not here, pretend that the sitting room and my parents and older brothers are the only targets, okay? Pretend the- fuck- the nursery isn’t there? Please, we’ll leave you alone, we’ll say we didn’t see anything- fuck- we can be friends! Do you want to be friends? Let’s be friends! I- I like to read. I like to read. Please-”

Jinx doesn’t move.

Her fingers are trembling over the trigger as she tries to figure out what to do. She doesn’t want to disappoint Mister Silco, she doesn’t want to hurt Mikkin, she already wants to puke at the blood and how his legs aren’t moving-

The machine gun digs into her shoulder. Her arms and wrists hurt. Her head hurts - Mister Silco forgot to give her the tea this morning. Mikkin is still talking, his voice going in and out like Vander’s gramophone, just saying the same things over and over, ‘they must be proud, you’re so big, you’re so strong, you did so good, they must love you so much, my sister’s nine, we can be friends, just let me go, please, please-’

She can’t help it as her trembling lower lip goes into bawling and the machine gun hits the ground, a shot firing down the hallway. It doesn’t hit anyone.

“I don’t-” Powder-Jinx wails. “I don’t wanna hurt you-”

Mikkin practically melts with how relieved he looks. “Thank you, thank you, you’re so good-”

Bang.

A single round goes through his forehead, and by the time that Jinx hits the ground, covering her ears with a scream, Mikkin’s head is already touching the ground with how he slumps, his empty green eyes staring at her as Jinx wails. There’s a splatter of heat across the front of her helmet and her cheeks and chin, but it doesn’t cancel how her full body’s starting to shake, everything going cold like someone dumped her in a cold tub right as the heating went out.

Sevika steps towards her, holstering her gun like she didn’t just murder someone. Jinx’s ears are ringing. The only thing she can hear are her own screams and cries and the gunshot over and over and over.

“Kid.” Sevika says from a million miles away as Jinx kicks and kicks and kicks like it can get her away from Mylo’s- Mikkin’s, Mikkin’s, his name was Mikkin, not Mylo’s- eyes. “Kid. Kid! Hey! Hey, look at me!”