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It wasn’t possible to sleep under the stars in Zaun. Even from a spot where the sky was actually visible, the pollution was too thick to see much of anything, and the air was so bad that no one could stand to look for long anyway.
Silco chose not to think much about it. A man like him couldn't waste time dreaming of impossible things — he focused his thoughts on what he could do. And yet... lying under a brilliantly starry sky, breathing fresh cold air, with Jinx in his arms, was enough to make him believe the impossible.
After all, Silco was supposed to be dead.
He didn’t remember being dead, but he did remember dying quite clearly. He remembered the bullets, the pain, the tears in Jinx’s eyes. It was like his good eye closed on her perfect face, then opened up again to the same sight. The same... only he was on his back, not tied to a chair, and Jinx was leaning over him, not kneeling in front of him, and she was... smiling. She was crying too, gleaming shimmer-tears, but she was also smiling. He reached out a hand he never expected to move again and cupped her smooth cheek.
He ran his thumb across her lips. I fixed it, they shaped, near soundlessly.
How, precisely, Jinx had fixed it took some time to come clear.
Jinx had taken Silco straight to Singed. Singed couldn’t revive him as he had Jinx — he was too far gone — but he made her a deal. He would keep what was left of Silco in stasis until Jinx could find some other solution, provided she would share that solution with him.
With his daughter.
They had made rather a poetic pair, Silco gathered: a young woman trying to save her father, an old man seeking the same for his daughter. Together, she and Singed traveled with two glass coffins behind — one for a man more dead than alive, the other for a girl more alive than dead, but just as doomed. Together, they studied every scrap of magic or science they could find on resurrection and healing. For a long time, Silco knew, Singed had thought the answer lay in some wild combination of the two, and no one found wild combinations like Jinx.
On a frozen island in the Ice Sea, she found that combination. In a world of snow and clear starlit nights, Jinx fixed it. And she was crying and laughing at once as he stroked his hand back, threaded fingers into her beautiful hair, and drew her close.
Later, Jinx lifted him easily and carried him to the tent she and Singed had set up near the ancient ritual circle. It was large, with a lab, a table heavy with tomes and scrolls, the glass coffins, and four narrow cots.
Later, Singed woke his daughter — little Orianna — by the same methods. She was a sweet child, seemingly untroubled by the time she had missed, her father's ravaged face, or her own altered condition.
Later, Silco found a mirror to inspect his wounds, sewn together with blue thread and healing inhumanly fast. His eye was a shimmer-beacon in a sea of night.
Jinx had wriggled under his arm to join his reflection with hers. Handsome, she declared.
He snorted.
She gripped his chin and looked at him hard, then her face twisted. Does it hurt?
Jinx meant his scarred chest, perhaps, but more probably his eye — always, always the eye. His chest barely hurt. His eye... the pain he had lived with for years was not gone, but it was... dulled. As if something searing and open in him was, like the other injuries, finally healing over. Not much, he said.
She kissed the scars along his cheek and temple, lips fever hot.
Ever since she was a little girl, Jinx ran cold. Her hands and feet — Janna, her feet — were like ice much of the time. Silco didn’t mind, even when she was crawling into his bed after a nightmare and jarring him from what little sleep he ever got. In fact, in those early years he sometimes thought he would miss it, those feet climbing up his calves as she wound herself around him, when she got older and stopped coming to him.
But she never stopped.
Now, after the shimmer, she seemed to generate her own heat.
Now, when Jinx had nightmares, Silco climbed into her cot with her, his stroking hands quieting her before she could wake the others.
Now, her fingers were like hot coals inside his shirt, feeling the scars along his chest and pressing, just shy of too hard, to check that they no longer bled.
She had seen the death of so many people she loved. Maybe she couldn't bear one more, maybe she couldn't bear for it to be him, or maybe — maybe what Singed did for her had simply given her hope that there was a way to stop it this time, a way to fix it, and as she always would she grabbed the chance with both hands.
Silco was grateful to her for saving him — but no more grateful than he had always been to her, simply for existing. His perfect girl.
They stayed a week in that tent.
In the mornings, Silco kissed Jinx's forehead softly enough not to wake her, and ate dried meats with Singed while looking out on the snow that glittered like diamonds beyond the tent.
In the daytime, he helped Singed organize old notes, Jinx feed the sled dogs, and Orianna catch Jinx or her father unaware with snowballs. He rested, more than he was used to. Twice a day, Jinx gave him modified shimmer injections. Orianna had similar treatments, and soon all four of them hardly felt the cold, with more magic and shimmer in their veins than blood.
In the nights, he stopped even trying to sleep alone — though he and Jinx just slept, in deference to their companions. And when the walls of the tent felt too close — like the waters of the Pilt closing over his head again — Silco slipped outside and Jinx, laden with blankets, trailed sleepily along behind him to make their bed out under the stars, entangled and warm.
“It’s beautiful here,” he said one night. He used to keep such things from her — regrets and dreams he could not admit even to her, because he refused to admit them at all — but Jinx was easy to talk to like this, half asleep against him, and anyway everything had changed. All that clawing for power, all that self-denial, all the shadows and secrets, had availed him nothing in the end. So he talked to her about how little he knew of the world beyond Zaun and Piltover. About all the things he wanted for his people, and all the things he never would have had if not for her. About the night sky in Zaun.
“We’ll see the stars from home one day,” Jinx mumbled with heartstopping certainty — but what was one more impossible thing, to an impossible girl like her? “But, you know, we don’t hafta go back just yet.”
“I... suppose not.” His fight against Piltover had long been a war of attrition, and travel always seemed at best an unnecessary distraction. But that too had changed after the Talis boy offered him everything he ever wanted, at the single price he would never pay.
And now he and Jinx were alive and safe and together, against all odds. And Jinx had seen so much of the world; they could see more of it together.
The war... the war could wait.
Jinx’s voice had been so sleep-slurred he wondered if she would even remember what they said, but the next morning Jinx was awake before all of them.
"What is it?" Singed asked Silco, as Orianna trundled out into the snow after Jinx.
“We’re not going back yet!” Jinx yelled.
“Us either!” Orianna yelled back, and their laughter rang like bells through the frozen air.