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“No, please just—” a struggled, hitched breath. “Please jus’ leave me alone.”
The words were slurred and tangled together, muffled in the confines of Jinx’s drawn knees pressed against her face. Every breath she takes sounds more pained than the last and it’s all the more reason to make Sevika worry, which is still such a new feeling into this wild new life of theirs that she still has to make a mind not to wince at the feeling.
She knows Jinx is—well, Jinx. Silco’s little pet, his daughter, that he lets run loose like hell and coddles and tells that she’s genius and brilliant and perfect, and that nothing is ever wrong with her. They all know it’s just sweet nothings a parent whispers to a child when they get—get like this, and Jinx has many, many episodes of this. But Sevika isn’t a parent, nor even a suitable poor replacement of one. Just another weak cardboard holding up this make-belief house the three of them are playing.
Still. It’s hard not to see her like this and not want to do every single sickly-sweet thing she saw Silco commit in the privacy of his room back then. Exactly the same things she feels nauseous even looking at, then, swears that she will not ever have children if being a parent means having to do all that. But tonight she is begging Jinx to at least let her in. And Jinx, unfortunately, is still Jinx all the same.
“I don’t think I want to do that, kid,” Sevika murmurs, low and cautious. “Matter of fact, I don’t think I should.”
She slams her fist against the floor with a force that tells Sevika she’s either careless to pain or the crossed wires in her brain are preventing her from feeling it. “WHY?”
“Look at yourself,” Sevika says, still with the same amount of calm that she could almost pass it as nonchalance—as someone who doesn’t seem to care whatever happens either way, even when the reality is the complete opposite. “You know you can stay like… this , all you want. But does it solve what’s happening?”
There’s no answer to that, but whatever that will come won’t be a rational one. Sevika knows how useless it is to try to reason with her when she’s like this—she’s watched Silco try, at first. But there’s a reason why he’d always resolved to cradling her like an overgrown baby every time after. So Sevika tries, as gently as she could muster, “what’s happening, Jinx?”
At the mention of her name—maybe it’s her name, or maybe it’s something her sister used to hurt her, when she’s like this nobody is sure anymore—Jinx wails, all throaty and frustrated. Okay, so maybe not Jinx. She grabs a fistful of her hair and pulls, pulls like she’s hell-bent on going bald at nineteen, and Sevika’s arm instinctively reaches out to prevent her but remembers the second rule of the game: no restraints. As horrible as it is to watch her harm herself. Not even a single touch unless she’s calmed enough to consent to it.
“OK—alright. Powder?”
“I don’t KNOW!” She screams, before the wails melt into incoherent sobbing, slurred repeats of “ I don’t know, don’t know, don’t…”
“OK. Just you, then. Just you.” Not Powder, and not Jinx, which means she has to resort to everything she has ever gone against: pet names. “Kiddo.”
The sobbing cuts for a bit with the sudden surprise that comes, a hitched breath, and then: a blown-out electric purple eyes peeking from behind the wild mess of damp hair and an arm clutched over her head.
“Yeah… yeah, there you are,” she swallows, thickly. It was a countermeasure, whatever she’s going to be saying, now, going to be doing. Just countermeasures. Whatever it takes. “Come here, sweetheart.”
Jinx frowns harder, seemingly trying hard to understand what the hell she’d just heard come out of the gruff woman’s mouth, and Sevika couldn’t blame her. She couldn’t believe herself, either, but it had to be done, no matter how squirmish it felt saying it out loud. Countermeasures. “You know it’s not going to do you any good just sitting there. Come on.”
Jinx draws a sharp breath. “But you—” and then stops. As if that was the entire sentence, confused and disoriented. And Sevika waits, right there, with her arms still open, because nobody else was going to do it for her.
“This—s’sucks,” Jinx mutters, halfway burying her head back in her arms to muffle a hitched sob. “I dunno.”
“Don’t know what?”
“Dunno what’s wrong with me.”
“Nothing’s wrong with you,” Sevika answers, a bit too quickly. “Just upset. That’s all.”
“But I feel—I feel… messy. I don’t know.” Jinx draws another shaky breath, and then—”FUCK!”
“Okay. OK. I know,” she held out her hands, again, “I know you’re frustrated.” It sounds like something Silco would calmly say, back then, when he’d been alive. Sevika never really paid much attention to them when Jinx gets like—like this. It was never really her thing. But then again, she didn’t really expect to be the one taking over once the old man kicked the bucket. But here she is. “And I know it’s loud in there, in your head, but I can help.”
Jinx looks up, helplessly. “How?”
“Let me show you,” Sevika holds out her hand once more for her to take. “You know you can’t fight it forever.” And then, because she’s talking to someone reminiscent of a toddler’s behaviour, after all, “come here, now.”
She’d thought she had to avoid commands—Jinx was notorious for hating anything that wasn’t a hundred percent freedom. But tonight, all she Jinx did was suck on her lip between her teeth for a little more, stare down with her insecure doe eyes, and slowly—very slowly, but movement still—uncurl herself to move towards her.
“There you go,” Sevika murmurs, making a mind to keep her arms steady as Jinx slowly climbs onto her lap, as if one move would break the calming charm that’s wound its way around the room. “Come on. You—” A surprised inhale, as Jinx tightly wrapped her arms around her broad shoulders and nestled her face in the crook of her neck—and then, as she felt Jinx tighten up in defense, a slow exhale. “Yeah, alright. You go on and do that.”
Jinx shook her head, still with the same tightness her body holds, “This is stupid —”
But then Sevika, out of impulse or panic or both, moves to clasp her palm under her head, and guides her to press against her chest for the longest while. And as though a sedative has been injected into her bloodstream, Jinx gradually lets her body slump against her own—relaxes her arms, her jaw, her entire chest slowly collapsing against hers.
“There you go,” she murmurs. “Keep breathing. You’re alright.” It must have looked so peculiar, the both of them, Sevika of the Lanes cradling a tall, overgrown baby in her lap, wild blue hair plastered all over the place. She understood, now, why Silco had always been so hostile when Jinx was being like this. And she’s beginning to understand it, why she was the only one out of all he’d let in without a word… that old bastard.
It’s not that Sevika isn’t afraid, or that this doesn’t feel strange at all for her—it does, incredibly so, for the both of them. But Jinx is stiff and still and so small, in her arms, and it was hard to think of anything else then. “Relax. You gotta stop fighting it. Just let yourself be.”
“You don’t know shit,” Jinx spat, like a hissy cat.
Sevika sighs, patiently. “I’ve watched you do it with Silco for years, I think I know enough.”
A sudden hiccup. And then Jinx’s voice, quieter, smaller, “you—you’re not gonna—?”
“No,” She says, moving a hand up to reach her forehead and stroke her hair, fingers through her scalp—if Jinx wanted to act like a hissy cat, she might as well be treated like one. “Whatever it is you think I’d do, no.”
Silence—heavy, tentative breaths being swallowed as her body fights itself, and Sevika stays, grounding, still. “You can trust me,” she murmurs, voice low. “You know you can.”
Jinx hiccups again—halfway a sob, muffled in the dip of Sevika’s broad shoulders. “M’sorry.”
“You’re alright.”
“I’m—” she shudders. “I’m, I want—”
“Take it slow,” Sevika says, her other arm—for some reason, as if under a trance—moving to rub soothing circles along her back. “Tell me what you need.”
Jinx’s body shifts, curls closer into her waist, and when Sevika looks back to her side, she’s biting the nail of her thumb between her teeth. Like a—oh, fuck. Like Powder used to do.
Alright. She can do this shit. If Silco could, then like hell if she can’t.
“I want my monkey.”
Oh. Yeah, right, she remembers that—the one Vander stitched up for her. He used to haul little Powder over his shoulder if she was getting particularly fussy and cradled her there, whatever the hell it was he was doing. It made him look soft and vulnerable—when Sevika was younger, she’d thought it’d made him weak, those children of his. She used to scoff and laugh it off with her gambling mates, moan to them all that she would never.
Here, rising up to her feet with the now-teenage-little-girl cradled on her waist, careful not to disturb whatever semblance of calm she’d managed to find—God. Those two bastards have to be laughing their asses off in their graves right now.
“Yeah, alright. Let’s go find your damn monkey.”
Strangely, Sevika doesn’t mind it all that much.