Work Text:
The light crosses the line as it is wont to do. She pretends she cares as the door opens, just those two heartbeats too slow. This is their usual song and dance, their little push and pull. At first she tolerated it. Now she entertains it, knows that it is a little rebellion that she possesses the magnamity to overlook.
"You're late."
Footsteps tap, slowly across the perfectly polished floor. Caitlyn looks up from her desk into grinning pink eyes, at an upturned chin, a smirk painted over far-too-smug lips.
Perhaps she should be less magnanimous next time.
"A wizard is never late, he arrives exactly when he means to."
"You might be what they call a wiz," Caitlyn says as she puts her pen down, "and most would not understand your craft but you and I both know that you are most certainly not a wizard."
Jinx's back curves, her shoulders duck in on themselves, her hand going to her chest like Caitlyn's chosen her as a target instead of her usual prey. It lasts a blink before she rolls her eyes and straightens herself up.
"Sheesh," drawls Jinx. "Someone's never heard of a joke."
"And someone needs to come up with funnier ones. This deflection does not change the fact that you're late."
Jinx's head tilts in the direction of the door.
"Someone's guards," she says, "decided to take a little longer going through my things today. Like they still think I'm going to hurt you." Her shoulders come up in a shrug. "I mean, I am. But only because we need to. You know. That's the whole deal."
Jinx flops down onto the part of the desk that Caitlyn has had cleared of papers for this eventuality. Just because she might no longer have perfectly monogrammed stationery doesn't mean she would like her work to be crumpled under the uncouth crush of Jinx's heavy boots.
Not that Jinx would dare to put her feet on the desk. She's seen what goes on here. She knows better.
A tilt of those light blue braids.
"Tired of chit-chatting?"
Caitlyn dignifies this with the slightest raise of her eyebrows.
"Will you ever?"
Jinx's grin widens as she leans closer.
"No," she says. "Don't think that's a thing they ever really managed to yank out of my head, for all that they've tried."
"They certainly shouldn't have bothered," Caitlyn murmurs. "I find you far more interesting while you're running your mouth."
Jinx chuckles. The touch to her cheek is gentle, the fingers that wrap around her head to the back to unfasten her eyepatch almost caring. The pressure lifts from her skull, the pain sets into the depths of her face. Caitlyn breathes through it, breathes through the fire, breathes through the pulsing agony.
Jinx doesn't ask.
Caitlyn doesn't need her to.
The prosthetic is popped from the socket. It triggers tears from her other eye that Jinx has by now learned to not comment on. Caitlyn lets the fluid drip unhindered down the side of her cheek for now—no point when the worst is yet to come.
Jinx looks at the brilliant blue orb.
"You used it," she says. There is no judgment in her tone. This too, she's learnt.
"Once," says Caitlyn, the pain dipping into a dull ache, the emptiness setting in. There is a chill that rattles deep into her skull, whether real or phantom she does not know and does not care to think about.
The orb floats above the device that Jinx has unfolded onto Caitlyn's desk. A soft whir as it spins, then silence, blue light pulsing, growing and dimming as it is put through its paces. The magic is infinite. The shell, no one knows. It has been improved, its enclosure reinforced by one of the sharpest minds still on this plane. Its inventors are not. They are gone.
Caitlyn had not been there.
If she had been, she would not be here.
It is a simple as that.
The world spins on, Caitlyn has learnt, regardless of who's in it. The world moves on, unhindered by the dead, uncaring of those left behind. The vultures will feast with no hesitation, the jaws will snap at any sign of weakness. Caitlyn bears the scars, steeps in the mistakes, drags her booted feet through the blood of these consequences.
And now she is here.
"You should be careful," says Jinx as the device scatters its unnatural blue about this windowless room.
Caitlyn waits for her to continue.
Jinx doesn't, hunched over the science, fingers flexing in and out of clenched fists.
The laugh that sneaks out is a soft trickle, warm and quiet.
Jinx's head turns in surprise.
"Would you cry for me?" Caitlyn leans in so close she catches that lactonic scent that clings to Jinx's skin. "Would it sadden you if I died?"
Caitlyn's eyes flick down to those barely parted lips, then back up. This close she can almost drown in the fluorescent pink, bubblegum fruity sweet and oh so, so wide. Caitlyn wonders for a moment what Jinx would taste like, if the Shimmer that drips in those veins would be bitter on her tongue or if it would be candy intoxicating.
The bob of Jinx's throat is silent but so loud.
"No," she lies.
Fingers scoop the orb up. Only to the trained eye does it tremble, and only for a heartbeat. Then the Hexgem is popped back into Caitlyn's empty eyesocket with a tenderness that drives tears from her working eye, that has her head burn with the fire of an arcane wrongness.
Caitlyn smiles through the saltwater, through the dimming of the room back to the warm white-yellow of the lamp, the setting of the sun into the sea.
"Good," she says as Jinx holds her head in her hands and fastens the eyepatch to hold the ticking timebomb back in place.