Chapter Text
Dust flows around two bodies caught in the moonlight tonight. There, in his old, wooden room smelling of solder and mildew; Jinx had caved and taken his hand for a dance.
Mellow, brassy music thrums from a salvaged gramophone, their chests brushing intermittently with each step to the tune, hearts falling in sync like an evidence. He remembers dancing with another version of her, their movements far more animated, clumsier. It had been everything he’d wanted and more. But this? This feels less like letting go and more like coming home.
Jinx in his arms, not Powder, just Jinx.
Jinx, Jinx, Jinx, Jinx.
She trusts him now, is letting him lead and gracefully sways with him like she’d been dreaming of this moment all her life—just like he had.
Is this even real?
Is she really here, all his, so pliant, warm and alive…his?
He moves his left foot backward in a smooth motion, sliding with her across the old floorboards, his fingers tightening on her waist as they sway and step to the mellow tune Vander used to play at The Last Drop. He can’t believe she’s held on to the vinyl this whole time; maybe not all of her had fallen down the well after all.
The low light of the room, so pale and hardly pure, refracts in shimmering pools where blue once had been. But tonight, Ekko finds it doesn’t hurt so much anymore—not when he still finds the same softness there once had been when they locked with his own eyes as children. Her lips are trembling, lower-lip caught between gapped teeth. It makes his heart clench.
He pulls her closer then, her hips flush with his, and for a moment they stand there, barely swaying, their proximity threatening to brush lips soon. Her heart skips a beat alongside his, as though it knew him before he even could. He can almost feel it, he swears.
Her eyes flick down to his lips, something like a question left unanswered too long. Ekko looks away first, as though she were too costly to see, but too good to feel, and she lets her head fall on his chest as they begin to sway in time with the music again.
Please stay, he wants to say.
Stay, have this dance with me forever, and…
There is a universe where he’s kissed her, but this is not the one—not yet. So Jinx just lets herself fall into his big, steady arms; they shield her before inevitably casting her out again. When he steps back and spins her around, her back colliding with his front, her choppy blue hair flows as though touched by the gentlest of breeze; so different and yet so alike what he’d experienced.
And she smells…nice.
Floral and clean, different from the buzzing sweetness of before but still alive, so present.
But then it fades, just like the tune does, and her scent doesn’t linger for much longer, grows more stale, less pleasant—this isn’t just Jinx in his arms, it’s always been loss.
She turns around, pressing her forehead to his and a hand to where his heart is beating—he can barely feel it.
“Ekko,” she whispers like the coldest of dreams. “You have to let me go.”
He shudders, pulls her closer. “I can’t.”
Like a dream caught in ancient breeze-woven patterns, the memory fades out of bunched sheets and clenched fists. Only an echo, forever locked in his slumber.
“I’m dead, remember?”
Dead, dead, dead.
Jinx is dead.
⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽
Ekko had loved watching his parents dance when he was little, swaying gently in their run-down living room as he watched through the creak of his door left ajar, way past his bedtime. They always danced to the same music, and back then he had thought it was their song. Now, grown and throwing the sheets off himself in his lonely bed, Ekko knows they simply had no means to get anything much else down in Zaun.
Inna and Wyeth.
Felicia and Connol.
Ekko and Jinx.
Lovers did not fare well here; something he was reminded of every morning. Still, had the dream really been necessary?
With a tight chest, Ekko sits up and reaches for his discarded socks off the side of the bed, puts them on, and pads towards his dresser where the few clothes he did own were folded in drawers. His fingers graze the side of a box he knows too well, there, tucked beneath his camisoles; Jinx’s snack box. A gift he’d spent a pretty penny on only for her to never get to finish any of the candies, biscuits, tea and hot chocolate mix left inside.
Realistically, he knows nothing should go to waste here in the Undercity, knows this could rot or go bad given too much time; but how could he empty what isn’t his
Ekko has killed, stolen, defied authority and saved. But this he cannot defile.
Not today.
Not ever.
Besides, there is no time for dancing nor rotting your teeth on sweets when Zaun still has so much to rebuild and overcome with less help than expected, unsurprisingly so far as Ekko’s concerned.
Still, he missed dancing with her at night the way they had. He missed the feel of her heartbeat syncing with his, and the softness of her small, callous hand in his—something precious trapped in armored skin, weaponised only to be loved and unraveled by him.
He can almost feel the ghost of her still swaying in this room, waiting for him to inch back in their circle and take her extended hand this time around. Her scent is still all around, and he could swear he feels his arms around him in the dead of night from time to time.
Deep down, Ekko knows it’s wrong. But if she truly is there in some way, he wants her to stay, hopes she won’t move on and pass through before it’s his time too.
Haunt me more, he wants to say.
Stay and dance with me again.
“I’m dead, remember?”
Dead, dead, dead.
Jinx never stays.
Would never.
Could never.
And Ekko is alone now, hand on the doorknob, waiting for someone who would never come home. Someone who would never make faces at his poorly brewed tea or shakily accept his hand to dance to some mellow, romantic tune that made them both blush again.
She had never seen it on him, would never feel nor know it now because he had been too proud to say it.
After the war, he had sworn. But he hadn’t intended for war to seep into the rest of his life and turn it into an endless uphill battle where he wasn’t certain she’d be at the other end of when the time would come anyway.
Jinx is dead, and maybe…maybe Ekko is too.
ꫂ ၴႅၴ