Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The first semester completed and Lux had still not seen her roommate.

She arrived late on move-in day, at some point when Lux was sitting cross-legged in a too-warm auditorium during one of Piltover University's endless orientation sessions, learning about fire evacuation routes she would never remember and campus meal plans she had already memorized from the brochure. By the time the session ended and Lux had made the walk back across the quad to Eastside Residential Hall, hauling the free tote bag they'd given her stuffed with pamphlets and a single complimentary pen, the other bedroom door in her suite was shut. A thin line of light bled out from the crack beneath it, and from behind the wood came the tinny sound of music she didn't recognize, something with a heavy bassline and a voice that sounded like it was being fed through a synthesizer.

Lux had knocked, introduced herself to the door, gotten no response, and figured her roommate had headphones in.

She never came out.

The next morning, the light beneath the door was off. Lux knocked again before leaving for her first day of classes and got nothing back but silence. She left a handwritten welcome card on the small counter beside the complimentary mini fridge, one of those Hallmark ones with a cartoon sun on the front that said "BRIGHT NEW BEGINNINGS!" on the inside, and when she returned that evening, the card had been moved approximately three inches to the left but was otherwise untouched. The other bedroom door was shut again.

That established the pattern for the rest of the semester.

Lux's schedule was built around mornings and early afternoons, the way she preferred it. She had Intro to Political Theory at eight, Modern Runeterran Literature at nine-thirty, a two-hour gap she filled with studying or coffee with friends, then Statistics at one. She liked routine, liked waking with the sun and having her evenings free for campus activities, club meetings, or the occasional party Ezreal would drag her to. Her roommate, this Powder person whose full name she'd only ever read on the housing assignment sheet, was the inverse of her in every conceivable way. An engineering major with classes that apparently only ran from late afternoon into the evening, a schedule that put her coming home when Lux was already behind her own closed door winding down for the night, and leaving sometime in the dead hours of early morning or deep into the next afternoon when Lux was long gone.

Their paths didn't cross because their paths existed on entirely different planes of reality.

Lux stopped giving it much thought after the first month. She had enough to occupy her attention. Piltover University was everything she had hoped it would be when she'd fought her mother tooth and nail to attend. The campus was a sprawling, gorgeous thing that blended old Piltovan architecture with sleek modern buildings, all of it threaded through with green spaces and walking paths and little courtyards with benches that were perfect for reading between classes. The student body was enormous, drawn from all over Runeterra, and for the first time in Lux's life she was surrounded by people who hadn't known her since birth, who didn't know the Crownguard name or its weight, who just saw a blonde girl with a bright smile and a tendency to talk too much and decided she was worth sitting with at lunch.

She made friends quickly. That had always been her gift, if she was being generous with herself, or her compulsion, if she was being honest. Ezreal, who lived one floor up and who she met in the first week when he accidentally walked into the wrong dorm room because every door on the Eastside looked identical, became her closest friend almost immediately. He was confident and funny and a little too aware of how good-looking he was, but underneath the bravado was someone genuinely kind who texted her memes at two in the morning and always saved her a seat in the dining hall. His roommate, Kayn, was more of an acquired taste: sharp-featured and moody, with an affinity for black clothing and an unsettling habit of appearing silently behind people in conversations, but he grew on Lux the way a splinter does. There was Sarah Fortune, who everyone just called Sarah or MF depending on how well they knew her, a striking redhead from Bilgewater who carried herself like she expected the world to rearrange itself around her and was usually right. There was Soraka, quiet and thoughtful and pre-med, who always had tea and advice in equal supply. There were dozens of others, people from her classes and her clubs and the parties and the dining hall and all the overlapping social circles that made up college life.

Lux was happy. Genuinely, thoroughly, for perhaps the first time in a long time, happy.

And she basically had a single as a freshman, which was the kind of housing luck most students would commit minor felonies for.

Piltover University's residential system was generous compared to most schools. Every enrolled student living on campus was granted their own private bedroom; the trade-off was that you shared a common room with one or two other students, a space that typically included a small kitchenette counter, the mini fridge, a couch, a coffee table, and whatever personal touches the residents decided to add. From that common room, two bedrooms branched off on opposite walls, each with its own door. It was more apartment than dorm, honestly, and Lux had been grateful for it when she first saw the layout. Privacy when you wanted it, community when you needed it.

The problem was that her particular community consisted of a ghost.

By the time winter break rolled around, Lux still hadn't seen her roommate. Not in their dorm, not out and about on campus, not at any party or sports game or club fair or campus event. She didn't know what Powder looked like. She didn't know what Powder sounded like. All she knew, cobbled together from the small evidence of shared space, was this: her name was Powder. She was enrolled in the engineering department and was, apparently, its top-ranked student, a fact Lux learned when she overheard a group of engineering majors in the library complaining about the curve in their Theoretical Mechanics course being destroyed by "that Powder girl who never shows up to lecture but still aces everything." She stocked their shared mini fridge with energy drinks at a rate that suggested either a serious caffeine dependency or a fundamental misunderstanding of human biology. She kept odd hours. She was quiet, or at least quiet enough that Lux never heard her through the walls. And she either never slept or slept at times so irregular they defied categorization.

So then the second semester started.

Lux returned to campus after a hellish month at home, and the word "hellish" didn't feel strong enough but she couldn't think of a better one. Winter break in the Crownguard household meant her mother's annual campaign of introducing Lux to an unending rotation of "suitable young men" from families with the right last names and the right bank accounts, each one more interchangeable than the last. It meant hours of supplementary tutoring with her Aunt Tianna, who believed that a Crownguard woman should be able to discuss policy, law, and diplomatic history with the same fluency as breathing. It meant dinners where Lux's posture was corrected three times in the first course alone and where every word she spoke was weighed against some invisible standard she could never quite meet. It meant smiling until her face ached, and being grateful, and being perfect, and coming back to Piltover University in January feeling like she'd been holding her breath for four straight weeks.

Her dorm room, with its quiet and its solitude and its other bedroom door that stayed perpetually shut, had never looked so welcoming.

She expected not to see her roommate still. She was right.

"Yeah," Lux said, taking a bite of her sandwich. She was sitting across from Ezreal in the dining hall on the second day back, the lunchtime rush buzzing around them, trays clattering and conversations layering over each other into a warm, ambient noise. "I guess I like it? It's nice living alone, pretty much."

Ezreal leaned back in his chair, balancing it on two legs the way he always did despite Lux telling him every single time that he was going to crack his skull open one day. "Isn't it lonely, though?" He tilted his head, genuinely curious. "I mean, I kinda hated Kayn for the first month. The guy literally meditates at four in the morning and it sounds like he's summoning something. But we get along pretty well now. It's kinda nice living with a friend."

Lux thought about his words for the rest of the day.

She thought about them through her afternoon class, where Professor Heimerdinger spent forty-five minutes on a tangent about the sociopolitical ramifications of hextech patents that had nothing to do with the syllabus but was somehow still fascinating. She thought about them on the walk home, her boots crunching through the thin layer of snow that Piltover's January had dusted across the campus paths. She thought about them while she sat on her bed with her laptop open and a reading assignment she wasn't reading.

It's kinda nice living with a friend.

Lux didn't know if she and Powder could be friends. She didn't know if Powder wanted that, or if the silence between them was deliberate, a boundary drawn by someone who simply preferred to be left alone. Some people were like that, and Lux respected it. She had spent her whole life in a household where privacy was something you fought for, not something freely given, and she understood intrinsically the value of having a door you could close.

But she also knew that not once in an entire semester had she tried.

The welcome card didn't count. The welcome card was a formality, a social nicety, the kind of thing you did because it was polite and expected and because Hallmark had made a card specifically for the occasion. Lux had never actually made an effort to reach out to the person living fifteen feet away from her, had never done anything more than knock twice and then retreat into the comfortable assumption that her roommate just wasn't interested.

That felt, suddenly, like something worth changing.

She started with a sticky note.

Lux had always loved stationery, the kind of small, bright, organizational supplies that made the world feel manageable and cheerful. Her desk was stocked with color-coded pens and highlighters and tabs and, yes, sticky notes in every color the campus bookstore carried. She peeled a yellow one from the pad, uncapped a pen, and stood in the common room for a moment, considering what to write. The mini fridge hummed softly beside her. Inside, she knew, was the usual line of energy drink cans in flavors she'd never heard of, alongside her own neatly labeled containers of meal-prepped lunches.

She kept it simple.

Hope you have a good day!

Sincerely,

Lux

She pressed the note to the front of the mini fridge, right at eye level, smoothed it flat with her thumb, and went to bed.

The most she hoped at the time was that Powder would read it, maybe smile, and that would be the entirety of the interaction. A small kindness tossed into the void between their schedules. She wasn't expecting a response any more than she'd expected one from the welcome card five months ago. It was a gesture, not a conversation, and she made peace with that before she even turned off her lamp.

She hadn't expected a note back.

The next morning, Lux walked into the common room at seven-fifteen, the way she always did, heading for the mini fridge to grab the yogurt she'd stashed for breakfast. The yellow sticky note was still there. Directly beneath it, on a torn scrap of what looked like graph paper, a response had been scrawled in handwriting that could charitably be described as chaotic. The letters were uneven, some capitalized and some not, slanting in different directions as though the writer's hand couldn't decide on an angle, and there was what appeared to be a small doodle of an explosion in the corner.

All it said was: u too

Lux stared at it for a solid thirty seconds. Then she smiled so hard her cheeks hurt, pulled out her yogurt, and sat on the couch to eat it while rereading two words as though they were a particularly compelling novel.

It was the first conversation the two had ever had.

And it kept going.

The notes became a ritual, as natural to Lux's daily routine as brushing her teeth or the specific order in which she packed her bag each morning. She would leave one before bed or first thing in the morning, pressing it to the fridge with the same care she gave to everything she did, and by the time she returned to the dorm later in the day, Powder's response would be waiting for her. Always on graph paper, always in that sprawling, barely legible handwriting, and always accompanied by at least one doodle that ranged from surprisingly detailed mechanical sketches to crude stick figures doing things that probably violated several laws of physics.

The early exchanges were small. Surface-level. The kind of thing you'd say to a stranger you were just beginning to acknowledge as a person rather than a concept.

What's your favorite color? Lux wrote one Tuesday.

blue, Powder wrote back. Then, underneath, in smaller letters: the good blue tho not navy. navy is just sad black that gave up.

Lux laughed out loud in the empty common room, standing there in her pajamas at six-fifty in the morning with no one to hear her. She wrote back immediately: Mine is gold! Or like, a warm sunny yellow. What's your favorite food?

The answer came the next morning: anything that isn't from the dining hall. that place is a crime scene. do u actually eat there every day??

It's not THAT bad, Lux wrote, feeling oddly defensive of the cafeteria she herself complained about on a weekly basis.

lux. i got a piece of chicken from there in september that i'm pretty sure was still philosophically a dinosaur. i keep it in a jar for science.

You do NOT have a dinosaur chicken in a jar.

:)

Each note peeled back a small layer of the person on the other side. Lux learned that Powder was from Zaun, the industrial district on the lower east side of the city, a detail that explained the engineering focus and the energy drink dependency. She learned that Powder had been building things since she was small, that she described her own brain as a browser with two hundred tabs open and music playing from one of them but I can't figure out which one. She learned that Powder's favorite class was Advanced Robotics with Professor Viktor, who she described as the only person at this school who makes sense, and her least favorite was the mandatory humanities credit she was apparently fulfilling with an online Art History course she referred to exclusively as the bane of my existence and also my sleep schedule.

In return, Powder learned about Lux. The notes became longer as the days went on, Lux's neat handwriting filling the yellow squares until she started using the larger sticky notes, the ones that were practically index cards. She told Powder about her major in Political Science, which she'd chosen because it was expected but which she actually found interesting in spite of that expectation. She told her about Ezreal and the time he tried to microwave a fork. She told her about her Literature class, about Professor Nasus and the way he read passages aloud in a voice so deep and measured it made the whole room go still. She told her about small things, favorite songs and movies and books, the kind of inventory-of-self that builds the foundation of any friendship.

Powder's responses were always shorter. Always messier, both in handwriting and in structure. She had a way of writing that bounced between topics the way a pinball bounces between bumpers, one thought leading to another leading to another, connected by a logic that was entirely internal but somehow still followable if you paid attention. She used abbreviations and lowercase letters and an occasional emoji drawn by hand, a smiley face or a skull or a tiny bomb with a lit fuse.

She was funny. That was the thing Lux kept coming back to. Powder was genuinely, consistently, remarkably funny. The kind of humor that was designed to land well in a group, but in a raw, unfiltered way that suggested she simply saw the world at a slightly different angle than everyone else and couldn't help but comment on what she saw from there.

What's one thing you want to do before you graduate? Lux wrote one day, feeling ambitious.

build something that changes the world, Powder wrote back. And then, underneath: or blow something up in a way that looks really cool. i'll accept either.

Lux pinned that note to the small corkboard above her desk. She told herself it was because it was funny.

Two weeks into the note exchange, something shifted. 

Lux started thinking about Powder outside of the dorm.

It happened in small ways at first. She would be sitting in Professor Nasus's lecture, listening to him dissect the narrative structure of a Shuriman epic, and she'd think about how Powder would probably describe the protagonist's tragic flaw as skill issue and she'd have to press her lips together to keep from laughing. She would be walking through the campus bookstore with Soraka, looking at new planners, and she'd see a pack of sticky notes in a shade of blue that wasn't navy and she'd buy them without thinking about it. She would be eating dinner with Ezreal and Kayn and Sarah, and someone would tell a joke, and she'd think about how she needed to remember it so she could write it on tomorrow's note and see if Powder thought it was as funny as she did.

"You're smiling at your phone," Sarah observed one evening. They were sprawled across the common room in Sarah's suite, which she had to herself because her assigned roommate had transferred schools in October and no replacement had been assigned. Sarah was painting her nails a deep, arterial red, not looking up from the task, which made the observation feel all the more unsettling because it meant she'd noticed through peripheral vision alone.

"What? No I'm not." Lux locked her screen. She had been looking at a photo of the latest note Powder had left, one she'd taken a picture of before leaving the dorm because it had made her laugh and she'd wanted to save it. The note was a detailed graph-paper drawing of what appeared to be a Roomba with a flamethrower attachment, captioned: my final project proposal. viktor said no. coward.

"You're smiling right now, still, talking to me about how you're not smiling," Sarah said, switching to her other hand with practiced ease of someone who considered nail maintenance a professional skill. "Who is it?"

"Nobody. My roommate left a funny note."

"The ghost roommate?" Ezreal looked up from the card game he was losing to Kayn on the floor. "She's still alive?"

"She was never dead, Ezreal."

"I mean, you don't know that. Have you ever actually confirmed that with like, visual evidence? She could be three raccoons in a trenchcoat."

"She is not three raccoons in a trenchcoat."

"A very smart or rich raccoon could probably get into the engineering program if it applied early decision."

Lux threw a pillow at him.

But the thought lingered, not the raccoon theory, but the underlying point. The underlying point was that Lux was thinking about a person she had never seen, never spoken to out loud, never been in the same room with while both of them were conscious and aware, and she was thinking about this person a lot. More than felt normal for a stranger. More than felt normal for a roommate she shared a mini fridge and a wall with but nothing else.

It was just that the notes made Powder feel like the opposite of a stranger.

On a Thursday in the third week of February, Powder mentioned the monkeys.

random question, the note read, do u have a favorite animal? mine is monkeys. specifically the little ones that scream. i feel a spiritual connection.

Lux wrote back that her favorite animal was a butterfly, which Powder's next note dismissed as the glitter of the animal kingdom. all flash no substance. a monkey could beat up a butterfly any day. Lux countered that butterflies weren't trying to beat anyone up, which was the whole point, and Powder countered that this was exactly why they'd lose, and they went back and forth on this for three full days of notes until Lux was arguing the aerodynamic superiority of lepidopteran wing structure with points she'd actually researched in the library and she had to take a step back and marvel at the fact that a girl she'd never met had somehow gotten her to voluntarily study entomology.

The monkey detail lodged itself in Lux's brain the way certain small details do when you're paying more attention to someone than you've realized. It was a nothing fact, a throwaway line, the kind of thing that slides out of most people's memory within hours because it's trivially unimportant. Lux remembered it the way she remembered the blue note and the flamethrower Roomba and the dinosaur chicken in the jar. She remembered it because it was Powder's, and somewhere along the line, that had become enough of a reason.

This was a Saturday, early March. Winter was loosening its grip on Piltover in the reluctant, halting way it always did, the snow thinning to slush and the sky cycling between gray and the kind of pale, watery blue that promised warmth it hadn't yet delivered. Lux was out with Soraka and Sarah, the three of them drifting through the shops on University Row, the stretch of boutiques and cafes and oddity stores that catered almost exclusively to the student population. Sarah was on a mission for a specific shade of lipstick that she insisted only one store in the city carried, and Soraka was along because she was the kind of person who genuinely enjoyed being helpful, and Lux was along because she'd been studying all morning and needed to exist somewhere that wasn't her desk.

They were in a shop called The Hex and the Hound, a cluttered little place that sold everything from vintage clothing to handmade jewelry to an inexplicable collection of ceramic frogs. Lux was browsing a shelf of small trinkets near the register, half-listening to Sarah debate thread count with the shopkeeper, when she saw it.

It was a stuffed animal. A small one, barely bigger than her hand, sitting on the edge of the shelf between a scented candle and a stack of handmade greeting cards. It was a monkey. A brown, soft, slightly lopsided monkey with wide stitched eyes and a curling tail and the kind of face that looked surprised by its own existence.

Lux picked it up. It weighed almost nothing. She turned it over in her hands, felt the cheap, soft fabric of it, and thought about Powder's note: mine is monkeys. specifically the little ones that scream. i feel a spiritual connection.

"What's that?" Soraka appeared at her shoulder, peering at the monkey with gentle curiosity.

"It's a monkey."

"Are you buying it?"

Lux looked at the price tag. Six dollars. She looked at the monkey's stupid, surprised little face.

"Yeah," she said. "I think I am."

She didn't explain who it was for, and Soraka, bless her, didn't press. Sarah was too deep in her trinket negotiations to notice the transaction at all. Lux paid at the counter, declined the offer of a gift bag, and tucked the monkey into her coat pocket, where it rode for the rest of the afternoon like a small, plush secret.

Back in the dorm that evening, Lux stood in the common room and considered her options. Leaving the monkey with a note on the fridge felt right. It was their established communication channel, the place where their exchanges lived. But the monkey was too big to stick to the fridge with a sticky note, and she didn't want to just leave it on the counter where it could be mistaken for something Lux had bought for herself and forgotten.

She put it on top of the mini fridge.

It sat there, this little brown monkey with its stunned expression, perched on the white surface of the fridge like a gargoyle on a cathedral, and Lux stuck a yellow note to its belly:

Saw this and thought of you! His name is up to you.

—Lux

She went to bed. She tried to read. She reread the same paragraph four times because some part of her brain was busy constructing elaborate scenarios in which Powder hated the monkey, thought it was weird, thought Lux was weird for buying a gift for someone she'd never met, and the whole note exchange collapsed under the weight of Lux having been too much the way she was always too much, too eager and too bright and too forward, the way her mother said she was, the way the suitors' polite smiles sometimes said she was when she talked too long or laughed too loud.

She turned off her lamp and told herself it was fine.

The next morning, the monkey was gone from the top of the fridge. In its place was a graph paper note that was longer than any Powder had written before.

OH MY GOD

LUX

I LOVE HIM

his name is Kiki and he lives on my desk now and i would die for him.

u didn't have to do that. seriously. that was like. really nice??? nobody really does stuff like that for me so i kinda just stood here for a while staring at him like an idiot.

anyway

thank u. actually. for real. not just for kiki (his full name is Kiki Thunderfist III don't ask about the first two) but for all the notes and stuff. i know i'm probably the worst roommate ever bc i'm literally never around and i have weird hours and i know my energy drinks take up too much fridge space

but the notes are my favorite part of the day. just so u know.

—P

Lux read it three times. Then she sat down on the couch and read it a fourth time. Then she very carefully peeled it from the fridge and brought it to her room and pinned it to her corkboard next to the flamethrower Roomba drawing.

She was still smiling when she left for class twenty minutes later.

She was still smiling in Professor Heimerdinger's lecture when the topic was international trade disputes and absolutely nothing about it warranted a smile.

She was still smiling at lunch when Ezreal asked her if she'd won the lottery and she said "No, just having a good day," and he looked at her with the squint of someone who knew her well enough to know that her good days were genuinely good but this seemed like a different category entirely.

The notes continued and kept growing. What had started as single lines on sticky notes evolved into paragraphs on graph paper, small essays tucked onto the fridge or left on the counter, a correspondence that would have been more efficient as text messages but that neither of them ever suggested switching to, as though the physicality of it, the pen on paper and the walk to the fridge and the anticipation of checking for a response, was part of the point. Maybe even the whole point.

Lux learned that Powder had a sister she hadn't seen in a long time, though the note that mentioned it was brief and uncharacteristically short on details, just: had a sister once. it's complicated. maybe some other time. Lux didn't push. She recognized the shape of a thing that hurt to talk about because she had her own. Instead, she wrote back about Garen, her older brother, the one member of her family she genuinely loved without reservation, who was currently deployed overseas with the military and who called her once a week from whatever base he was stationed at to tell her the same five jokes in rotation and ask if she was eating enough.

She learned that Powder's favorite season was summer because everything is louder in summer and that she hated the cold because she'd grown up in the undercity where the heating was unreliable and winters meant piling blankets and hoping for the best. She learned that Powder had a complicated relationship with the concept of home, that she'd moved around a lot growing up, that she'd ended up at Piltover University on a full engineering scholarship because someone, a professor or a mentor, the note wasn't clear, had seen what she could do and pulled strings.

In return, Lux found herself writing things she didn't usually say out loud. She wrote about the pressure of the Crownguard name, the way it opened doors but also built walls, the way she sometimes felt like she was performing a version of herself that had been written by someone else. She wrote about her mother's expectations and the exhausting parade of suitors and the particular loneliness of being surrounded by people who saw your family before they saw you. She wrote these things on yellow sticky notes and left them on a mini fridge in a shared common room for a stranger to read, and somehow that felt safer than saying them to the friends who sat across from her at lunch, because Powder existed in a space between anonymous and intimate that Lux had never experienced before, a closeness without proximity, a knowing without seeing.

You're really easy to talk to, Lux wrote one night, and meant it more than the simplicity of the sentence could hold.

right back at u, sunshine, Powder wrote back, and Lux wondered when she had decided to call her that and why it made something in her chest feel warm and terribly light.

March settled over Piltover University with the specific energy that the stretch between spring break and midterms always carried, a cocktail of rising temperatures and mounting deadlines and the collective student body vibrating between elation that winter was ending and dread at the workload that stood between them and a week of freedom. The trees along the quad were beginning to bud, tentative and optimistic, and the campus pathways that had been empty through January and February were suddenly populated again with students who had remembered that outside existed.

Lux was busier than she'd been all semester. Her Political Science midterm was a fifteen-page policy analysis that she'd been chipping away at for weeks, and Professor Nasus had assigned a comparative essay on Shuriman and Demacian literary traditions that was due the Monday after break, which meant she'd be writing it during break, which meant her mother would inevitably find something to criticize about whatever she was working on even though the woman had never read a piece of Shuriman literature in her life. On top of the academic load, Lux had committed to helping organize the university's annual Spring Formal as part of her role on the student activities committee, a decision she'd made in January when the event felt comfortably distant and was now regretting as the logistics of securing a venue, a caterer, and a DJ who wasn't just Ezreal with a Spotify playlist and a Bluetooth speaker closed in around her.

Through all of it, the notes continued.

They were the bookends of her days now, the first thing she checked in the morning and the last thing she wrote before bed. She had accumulated a small collection of her favorites on the corkboard above her desk, pinned there alongside photos of her friends and a postcard Garen had sent from Noxus. The flamethrower Roomba. The Kiki Thunderfist note. A drawing Powder had done of what Lux could only assume was a self-portrait, a stick figure with wild hair holding a wrench and standing atop what appeared to be a burning building, captioned: me after my thermodynamics final. A note that simply read: hey lux, did u know that octopuses have three hearts? i feel like u would appreciate that. u seem like a multiple-hearts type of person. She didn't know what that meant, exactly, but she liked it.

She thought about Powder in her classes more now. It wasn’t in a way that distracted her, not really, but in a way that ran like background music behind everything else, a constant, quiet awareness. She would hear something in a lecture and mentally compose the note she'd write about it later. She would see something funny on campus and think Powder would laugh at that. She would be in the middle of a conversation with friends and catch herself drifting, not away from the conversation but toward something else, some other thread of thought that always led back to the same place: a girl she'd never seen who left notes in impossible handwriting and named a stuffed monkey Kiki Thunderfist III.

"Earth to Lux." Ezreal waved his hand in front of her face. They were sitting on the low stone wall outside the library, enjoying the first truly warm afternoon of the year. The sun was golden and generous, the kind that made everything look slightly more beautiful than it actually was, and half the campus seemed to have migrated outdoors. Ezreal was eating an apple. Kayn was sitting on the ground with his back against the wall, reading something on his phone with an expression of profound disdain.

"Sorry." Lux blinked. "What?"

"I asked if you wanted to come to Jayce's party this Friday. He's doing a whole thing at the Theta house. Live music, the works."

"Jayce Talis? The junior?"

"The very same. He's trying to top Darius's party from last month, which, honestly, shouldn't be hard because that one ended with the fire department showing up. The bar is literally on the ground."

Lux considered. She had been meaning to relax. The midterm stress was getting to her, and she'd spent the last three consecutive Friday nights in the library. A party sounded nice. A party sounded, in fact, like exactly the kind of thing she needed: loud music and crowded rooms and the simple, physical pleasure of being young and out with friends and not thinking about policy analyses or Spring Formal logistics or the particular way her heart rate seemed to increase every time she saw a new note on the fridge.

"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, I'm in."

"That's the spirit. Kayn, you're coming too."

"I'd rather eat glass," Kayn said, not looking up from his phone.

"Great, be ready at nine."

Friday arrived the way Fridays do when you're looking forward to them, slowly and then all at once. Lux spent the afternoon finalizing a section of her policy analysis, attended a brief student activities meeting where she argued successfully for a string-light budget increase for the Spring Formal, and then returned to her dorm to get ready.

Getting ready for a party was its own kind of ritual. Lux showered, dried her hair until it fell in the loose waves she preferred, and spent twenty minutes in front of her small closet deciding between three outfits before settling on a fitted top in a warm gold that complemented her coloring and jeans that Sarah had once told her "made her legs look like they went on forever, and I say that as a compliment and also as an observation about the basic injustice of height distribution." She did her makeup at the small desk she'd repurposed as a vanity, light and practiced, the kind that looked effortless but wasn't.

Before she left, she stuck a note to the fridge.

Going to a party tonight! Hope your Friday is good. Don't let Kiki stay up too late.

—Lux

The walk to Fraternity Row took about fifteen minutes from Eastside Residential, cutting through the main quad and down the hill past the science buildings. Ezreal met her at the corner of the building with Kayn in tow, the latter looking like he was being escorted to his own execution. Sarah found them en route, materializing from a side path with the unerring navigational instincts of someone who had never been lost a day in her life, wearing a dress that was definitely not appropriate for the temperature but that she carried with the absolute confidence that made questioning her choices feel pointless.

The party was already in full swing when they arrived. The Theta Chi house was a three-story colonial that had seen better days but currently looked impressive under the glow of string lights draped across the porch and the warm light pouring from every window. Music thudded from inside, bass-heavy and percussive, the kind that you felt in your chest before you heard it in your ears. The front lawn was populated with clusters of students holding cups and laughing and doing the particular social dance of college party arrivals, the scanning of faces, the waving across distances, the slow gravitational pull toward the front door.

Jayce Talis himself was holding court near the entrance, tall and absurdly handsome in the way that made Lux understand, abstractly, why half the campus had a crush on him. He was talking with his hands, telling some story that had his audience captivated, and he broke off to wave when he saw their group approaching.

"Lux! Glad you could make it." His smile was wide and genuine. Jayce was one of those people who was almost annoyingly likeable, brilliant and charming and just self-aware enough about both to avoid being insufferable. He was also, Lux knew, an engineering student, and she had a brief, irrational thought about whether he knew Powder before dismissing it because the engineering department had hundreds of students and that was a ridiculous line of reasoning.

"Wouldn't miss it," Lux said, and meant it. She was already feeling lighter, the way a party's energy could lift you before you'd even walked through the door.

Inside was warm and crowded and loud. The main room had been cleared for dancing, furniture pushed against the walls, and a makeshift DJ booth had been set up in the corner where a student Lux didn't recognize was managing a setup that was significantly more professional than Ezreal's Bluetooth speaker. The kitchen was the drink hub, as it always was at these things, and Lux let Ezreal lead their group through the press of bodies to where bottles and mixers lined every available counter surface.

"What's your poison?" Ezreal asked, already reaching for a bottle of something clear.

"Surprise me," Lux said, which was a dangerous thing to say to Ezreal, and she knew that, and she said it anyway because the night felt open and bright and she was twenty years old and standing in a room full of music and possibility and she wanted, for one evening, to not be careful about anything.

The first drink was sweet and strong. The second was less sweet and stronger. By the third, Lux was on the dance floor with Sarah, both of them laughing at nothing, and the music was a physical thing that moved through her like a second heartbeat, and she felt loose and warm and incandescent in the way that only happens when you are just drunk enough to stop monitoring yourself and not yet drunk enough to lose the joy of it.

She talked to people she knew and people she didn't. She met a girl named Neeko from the art department who told her she had "a wonderful aura, like sunshine but with more layers" and Lux thanked her so sincerely that Neeko looked startled. She ran into Jayce again and they had a brief, shouted conversation about the Spring Formal that was almost entirely drowned out by the music but that seemed productive from what she could make out. She lost Ezreal at some point and found him again twenty minutes later in the backyard, engaged in a very earnest arm-wrestling match with a large junior named Braum who was clearly letting him win and who Lux thought might be the most genuinely sweet person she'd ever met.

The fourth drink was a mistake. She knew this even as she accepted it, because the room had started to feel slightly more fluid than it should and the edges of her vision had taken on a pleasant, golden blur. But Kayn, of all people, had made it for her, and Kayn never made anyone drinks, and he'd done it with such uncharacteristic solemnity, like a ritual offering, that refusing felt ruder than accepting.

The fifth drink was someone else's that she picked up off a table thinking it was hers and by then the distinction didn't matter much.

Time began to move in pieces rather than in a line. She was dancing. She was sitting on a couch talking to Sarah about something very important that she couldn't quite track. She was outside in the cold air, which felt amazing, and Ezreal was there telling her she should probably drink some water, and she was telling him that she was fine, she was great, she was having the best time, and all of that was true in the soft, slippery way that truth works when you're well past the point of accurate self-assessment.

At some point, she decided to go home.

This was, in retrospect, the right decision made for the wrong reasons. She didn't leave because she recognized she was too drunk, though she was, significantly. She left because she suddenly and powerfully wanted to check the fridge for a note from Powder, a desire so strong and so specific that it cut through the haze of alcohol like a lighthouse beam through fog, and she couldn't wait until morning to see if there was one.

She said goodbyes that she wouldn't fully remember later. Ezreal offered to walk her home and she said she was fine, which she mostly was, because the campus was safe and well-lit and the walk was only fifteen minutes and she could navigate it on autopilot even in her current state. She walked. The night air was cold and clean and felt like drinking water, and the campus was quiet in the post-midnight way that made it feel like it belonged to her alone. Her feet knew the path to Eastside Residential even when the rest of her didn't, carrying her up the front steps and through the keycard-locked entrance and down the hallway to her suite with the faithful efficiency of muscle memory.

She got her key into the lock on the third attempt. The door swung open into the dark common room. She did not turn on the light. She did not check the fridge for a note. She made it as far as the couch, which was approximately four steps from the door, and some part of her brain that was still functioning in an advisory capacity suggested that her bedroom was only a few more steps beyond that, but the couch was here and the couch was soft and the idea of navigating to her room and finding her bed in the dark required more coordination than she currently possessed.

She sat down. Then she was lying down. Then she was asleep.

She didn't know how long she'd been out when the sound woke her.

It was the click-and-swing of the suite's main door opening and shutting, followed by the particular shuffle of someone moving through a space they knew well in the dark. There were footsteps, soft but present, and then a small metallic clank that sounded like something being set down on the counter.

Lux's brain came online slowly and in pieces, like a computer booting up after a crash. She was on the couch. The common room was dark. Her mouth tasted like bad decisions. She was still in her party clothes, shoes and all, and one of her arms was hanging off the edge of the cushion in a way that had put it completely to sleep. Someone was in the room.

She blinked, trying to make her eyes adjust. The room was not completely dark, she realized. There was a sliver of light coming from somewhere, the hallway light leaking in through the crack under the main door, maybe, or the small power light on the mini fridge. It was enough to see shapes. The counter. The fridge. The outline of someone standing near it.

She registered long hair first. Braids, two of them, falling past the shoulders and catching even the faint light in a way that meant they had to be a vivid color, something pale and bright. Blue. The most extraordinary blue she had ever seen, electric and luminous, like someone had taken a piece of a neon sign and spun it into hair. The braids were long enough to drape down the person's front and they were thick and slightly messy, a few strands escaping their plaits.

Then she registered the face, or rather, the lack of one. Where a face should have been, there was something else entirely: a dark, rounded, reflective surface that caught the faint light and turned it into a dull gleam. It took Lux's sluggish, alcohol-saturated brain a full three seconds to process what she was looking at.

A welding mask. The person was wearing a welding mask, pushed up to the top of her head currently but present, a large and industrial-looking thing that turned the upper half of her silhouette into something alien and strange.

Below the mask and the impossible hair, the figure was dressed in overalls. Dirty overalls, the kind that had earned their wear honestly, stained with what looked like grease and something darker and possibly scorch marks, the straps hanging a little unevenly over a white tank top that had also seen better days. The tank top was thin enough, and the light was just sufficient enough, for Lux to make out the dark lines of tattoos running down the figure's right arm, cloud shapes, she thought, swirling and curling from shoulder to elbow and continuing down across her chest where the loose neckline of the tank top exposed collarbones and ink.

Multiple piercings caught the light in both ears. Small glints of metal, several in each, studs and small hoops arranged in constellations up the curves of cartilage.

The figure was standing at the counter, and she hadn't noticed Lux yet. She was doing something with her hands, moving things around, and there was the soft crinkle of a wrapper and then the click of what sounded like a lighter. Then she turned toward the fridge and pulled it open, and the sudden small interior light flooded the common room in a pale wash of white, and in that moment Lux saw everything in sharp, bleached-out clarity: the blue braids, the welding mask sitting on top of her head like a crown, the clouds tattooed on her skin, the lean lines of her figure in the battered overalls, and beneath all of it, a face.

The fridge light hit her from below, casting upward shadows that made her features look dramatic and strange, and Lux's drunk brain, which had been processing this apparition with increasing astonishment, arrived at the only conclusion that felt appropriate.

"Are you a biblically accurate angel?"

Her voice came out hoarse and wondering, slurred at the edges from alcohol and sleep. It was loud enough in the silence of the common room to make the figure at the fridge jump, startled, and spin toward the couch with the kind of reflexive speed that suggested she was used to being on alert.

There was a beat of silence. Then a laugh.

It was a real laugh, bright and sharp and startled out of her, the kind that escapes before you can decide whether or not you want to let it. It bounced off the walls of the small common room and landed somewhere in Lux's chest, and even drunk and disoriented and lying sideways on a couch with one dead arm, Lux thought it was one of the best sounds she'd ever heard.

"Holy shit," the figure said, and her voice was lower than Lux had imagined, rougher, with a cadence that bounced and lilted in a way that matched her handwriting. "You scared the crap out of me. What are you doing on the couch?"

"I live here," Lux said, with the solemn certainty of the profoundly intoxicated.

"Yeah, I know you live here, but you live in there." The figure pointed toward Lux's bedroom door. "The couch isn't a bed."

"It's horizontal," Lux said, as though this settled the matter completely.

Another laugh. The fridge door swung shut, plunging the room back into dimness, but the figure moved closer now, and Lux could see the outline of her more clearly as her eyes readjusted. She was shorter than Lux had expected, though most people were shorter than Lux. She was wiry. She moved with a kind of restless energy, even standing still, like the air around her was slightly more charged than the air around everyone else.

"You're Powder," Lux stated.

"Seems like it."

"I've never seen you before."

"Yeah, that's kinda been our thing. Notes on the fridge, ships in the night, all that." Powder tilted her head, and the welding mask on top of it shifted. "Are you drunk?"

"I went to Jayce's party."

"That tracks. You smell like bad tequila and poor life choices."

"I was told the drinks were good."

"I bet you were lied to." Powder stepped closer, and Lux could see more of her now, the sharp angles of her face, the wide set of her eyes, the tattoos winding up her arm like smoke made permanent. "How much did you have?"

Lux held up five fingers. Then she thought about it and put up another one. Then she put her hand down entirely because the math felt unreliable.

"Impressive," Powder said, and it sounded genuine. "Can you walk?"

"I walked here."

"Alright, now I'm asking if you can walk the remaining eight feet to your bedroom."

Lux considered this with great seriousness. "Unclear."

Powder stood there for a moment, and Lux could feel her gaze even through the murky darkness. Then she let out a breath that was half sigh and half laugh and moved to the side of the couch, and suddenly there was a hand on Lux's arm, warm and calloused and surprisingly strong, pulling her upright.

"Come on, bright eyes. Let's get you to bed."

Lux was swaying slightly as she sat up.

She stood up fully with Powder’s help. The room tilted agreeably to the left and then corrected itself, and she put a hand on Powder's shoulder for balance and found it surprisingly solid beneath the strap of the overalls. They were close now, closer than Lux had been to anyone all evening, and even in the near-dark Lux could see the details that the notes had never been able to convey: the specific blue of the hair up close, how it was almost impossible, too vivid to be natural but worn like it was the most natural thing in the world; the scatter of piercings up her ears, silver catching whatever scrap of light was available; the faint smell of metal and oil and something sharp, like solder, that clung to her clothes and her skin.

"Your eyes," Lux said, because they were right there, close enough to see properly even in the dark.

Powder paused, one arm still bracing Lux's elbow. "What about them?"

"I can see them even through the mask." The welding mask had slipped down slightly, sitting lower on Powder's forehead, but her eyes were visible beneath the rim, wide and luminous and a color that Lux's drunk brain fumbled for words to describe. Not quite blue nor quite gray. Something in between, like a winter sky just before the clouds break, pale and clear and startlingly, and dangerously vivid.

"You're very drunk," Powder observed, but her voice had gone softer, the sharpness smoothed away.

"Your eyes are the color of the sky," Lux said, with the absolute, earnest conviction that only true drunkenness or true feeling can produce. "The good sky that you see in the morning, when the sun just came up and everything is new."

Powder didn't say anything for a moment. Her grip on Lux's arm was steady. Then she reached up with her free hand and pulled the welding mask off her head entirely, setting it down on the couch behind them without looking, and in doing so she brought her face fully into view for the first time.

She had sharp features. High cheekbones that caught shadow and light in equal measure. A jaw that was defined but not severe. Her brows were thin and expressive, slightly arched even at rest, giving her a look of perpetual curiosity or amusement. Her skin was fair and somewhat but not entirely pale, with the faintest scatter of what might have been freckles across the bridge of her nose, though it was hard to tell in the low light. Her lips were slightly parted, as though she'd been about to say something and changed her mind.

And her eyes. Without the mask at all, without anything between them and Lux, they were extraordinary. That sky-blue-grey that Lux had glimpsed, fully realized now, wide and round and bright in a way that seemed to generate their own light. They were eyes that looked like they saw everything and were amused by most of it.

Lux had spent the better part of two months imagining what her roommate looked like. She had constructed various mental images, vague composites assembled from the personality that came through in the notes, and every single one of them had been wrong.

"You're beautiful," Lux found herself saying. It came out the way things come out when you're too drunk for filters: plainly, wholly, without caveat or self-consciousness. A statement of fact offered to the room as simply as one might state that the sky was up or the ground was down.

Powder blinked. Her eyes widened a fraction, which was impressive given how wide they already were. Something shifted in her expression, a flicker of surprise that softened into something else, something that Lux was too far gone to identify but that lived in the space between being caught off guard and being touched by it.

"Okay," Powder said, after a pause that lasted a heartbeat too long. "Okay, bright eyes. You are really, really drunk, and you are going to bed now."

"But I meant it."

"Bed. Now. Come on."

Powder guided her across the common room with a competence that suggested she was used to navigating in the dark, one hand on Lux's arm and the other reaching forward to find the doorknob to Lux's bedroom. She got the door open, steered Lux through it, and helped her sit on the edge of the bed with the practiced efficiency of someone who had probably done this before, maybe for herself, maybe for someone else. Lux's room was a mess of golden fairy lights and neatly organized shelves, and in the warm glow of the string lights she'd left on, everything looked hazy and dreamlike.

"Shoes," Powder said, and knelt down, and before Lux could protest she was pulling Lux's shoes off one at a time, setting them neatly by the bed. "Water. Do you have water in here?"

"Desk," Lux managed.

Powder found the water bottle on the desk, uncapped it, and put it in Lux's hand. "Drink as much as you can. You'll thank me tomorrow when your head isn't trying to fall off from the rest of your body."

Lux drank. The water tasted incredible, the best thing she'd ever tasted, and she wondered why she'd ever bothered with anything else.

"Okay." Powder straightened up and stood there for a moment, silhouetted in the doorway, the light from Lux's fairy lights catching the blue of her hair and the metal in her ears and the clouds on her skin. She looked like a figure from a painting, Lux thought, something from a gallery, something you'd stand in front of for a long time trying to understand.

"Thank you, Powder," Lux said, and it came out soft, the alcohol rounding the words into something almost tender.

"Get some sleep." Powder's voice was warm. Warmer than Lux had expected, warmer than the sharpness and the sarcasm and the chaotic handwriting had suggested was possible. "And for the record, you're not so bad yourself, bright eyes."

She pulled the door closed behind her, and Lux was asleep before the click of the latch finished sounding.

Morning came like a punishment.

The sun was an assault. Lux's fairy lights, still on from the night before, seemed to throb with a malicious luminescence. Her head was a construction site, something large and industrial happening behind her temples, and her mouth tasted like she'd been chewing on carpet. She lay in bed for a long time, eyes closed, cataloguing her suffering and trying to piece together the previous night from the fragments that floated in her memory like debris after a shipwreck.

The party. The drinks. Ezreal. Dancing with Sarah. The walk home. The couch.

The couch.

Lux's eyes opened.

The common room. The dark. The sound of the door. The fridge light. Blue hair, electric and impossible. A welding mask. Overalls and tattoos and piercings and a voice that bounced like her handwriting. Eyes the color of a morning sky. A face that was all sharp angles and surprising softness.

Are you a biblically accurate angel?

Lux pressed her palms against her face and made a sound that could generously be described as a groan and more accurately described as the verbal equivalent of wanting the earth to swallow her whole.

You're beautiful.

She had said that. She had said that out loud, to Powder's face, the first time they had ever been in the same room while both parties were (somewhat) conscious, and she had said it like she was commenting on the weather. Actually, she had said it with more conviction than she had ever commented on the weather. She had stated it as an established fact and then been put to bed like a child who'd had too much sugar at a birthday party.

Lux lay in her bed and contemplated whether it was possible to transfer universities mid-semester.

She got up eventually because her body demanded it, the water and the bathroom and the basic biological necessities that don't care about your emotional state. She brushed her teeth twice. She drank two full glasses of water. She looked at herself in the small mirror above her sink and winced at the mascara smudged under her eyes and the general pallor of her complexion, which had gone from warm gold to vaguely beige overnight.

Then she went to the common room.

Powder's bedroom door was shut with no light beneath it. She was either asleep or out, and given that it was, Lux checked her phone, eleven-thirty in the morning on a Saturday, she was almost certainly asleep.

The mini fridge hummed its quiet hum. On its surface, no note waited.

Lux pulled out a big sticky note. Her hands were a little shaky, which she attributed to the hangover and not the anxiety, even though it was definitely the anxiety. She stood at the counter and wrote carefully, her handwriting slightly less controlled than usual but still legible, and she took her time with it because it felt important.

Powder,

I am SO sorry about last night. I was way too drunk and I'm sure I was a complete mess and you were so nice to help me and I really, genuinely appreciate it. Thank you for getting me to bed and for the water and for taking off my shoes and for not just leaving me on the couch to fend for myself.

I'm sorry if I said anything weird or uncomfortable. I tend to lose my filter when I've been drinking and I know that's not an excuse but I want you to know that I didn't mean to make things awkward between us.

Actually, that's not right. I did mean the things I said. But I wouldn't have normally said them like that. Or at all. Or out loud to your face while you were wearing a welding mask.

Anyway. Thank you, truly. You're a really, really good person and I'm really glad you're my roommate, even if I just proved that I'm an absolute disaster of one.

—Lux

She pressed the note to the fridge, then went back to her room to suffer through the rest of her hangover in private.

She spent the afternoon in bed with water and crackers and her laptop, alternating between trying to work on her essay and staring at the ceiling replaying every moment of the previous night in excruciating detail. She remembered more than she wanted to and less than she needed. She remembered the laugh, bright and startled. She remembered the hand on her arm, calloused and warm. She remembered the eyes, that impossible pale blue-grey, and the way they'd widened just slightly when Lux had called her beautiful, a micro-expression that contained entire paragraphs.

She remembered Powder kneeling down to take off her shoes.

Nobody had done that for her since she was very small.

Around five in the afternoon, Lux's bladder forced her out of bed again, and on the way back from the bathroom she checked the fridge.

There was a response.

The graph paper was large this time, a full sheet rather than a torn scrap, and the handwriting was, if possible, even more chaotic than usual, slanting and looping in a way that suggested it had been written in a hurry or in a state of amusement or both.

lux. chill.

u were hilarious. the biblically accurate angel thing is genuinely the funniest thing anyone has ever said to me and i've heard some WILD stuff from people. u should be proud of that one honestly.

also don't apologize for being drunk that's like apologizing for being human. everyone's a mess sometimes. u just happen to be a very polite mess who compliments people's eyes while swaying like a tree in a storm.

for the record i'm glad i finally got to meet u. even if u were sideways on a couch at 2am and smelled like jayce's frat house, which, not great btw, that place smells like axe body spray and ambition.

and u DID NOT make things awkward. seriously. it was nice. ur nice. the whole thing was nice. we're fine.

oh and one more thing

call me Jinx :P

—J

Lux read it twice. Three times. A smile had crept onto her face by the second read and by the third it was a full, genuine grin that made her hangover feel approximately forty percent less terrible.

She pulled a new sticky note from the pad and wrote a single line:

Hi, Jinx. It's nice to officially meet you.

She pressed it to the fridge, and went back to bed feeling lighter than she had all day.

From that point on, she was Jinx.

The narration of Lux's internal world shifted as cleanly as if someone had found and replaced every instance, Powder becoming Jinx in Lux's thoughts the way a song you've been singing wrong for years suddenly snaps into its correct lyrics and you can never go back to the old version. Jinx. It fit better than Powder ever had, somehow. It had the same energy as the handwriting and the hair and the laugh, something sharp and bright and just a little bit dangerous.

The notes continued, but they were different now. They were a lot warmer. The drunk encounter had broken through some invisible membrane between them, a barrier that Lux hadn't realized existed until it was gone, and what flowed through the breach was an ease that changed the texture of their exchanges. Jinx's notes became more open, longer, more detailed. She told stories about her engineering projects in a way that made them sound like adventures, full of explosions (some intentional) and victories (most pyrrhic) and a cast of characters that included Professor Viktor, who she clearly idolized.

Lux's notes, in turn, became less careful. She stopped editing herself, stopped worrying about being too much, because Jinx's responses made it clear that too much wasn't a concept she operated with. Everything Lux wrote was met with matching energy, matched and raised and bounced back with interest, and the exchange had the rhythm of a conversation between people who had known each other much longer than they actually had.

On the notes, Jinx signed off as "J" now. Sometimes with a doodle. Sometimes with a postscript that had nothing to do with anything, an observation about a bug she'd seen on campus or a complaint about the dining hall or a random fact about explosives that Lux was fairly certain she shouldn't know but found charming regardless.

And in the warm spaces between the notes, in the hours of the day when Lux was out in the world living her life, she thought about Jinx with a frequency and an intensity that she was beginning to suspect was not entirely normal.

She thought about her roommate in statistics class, where the probability distributions on the board reminded her of a note Jinx had left about the statistical likelihood of the dining hall chicken being actually edible which Jinx had calculated with real numbers and a hand-drawn graph and concluded was approximately the same as being struck by lightning twice while holding a winning lottery ticket, so basically keep your expectations low. She thought about her in Professor Nasus's class, where a discussion of Demacian literary themes of duty and identity hit closer to home than usual and she spent the evening writing a long note about it that turned into something more personal than she'd intended, something about masks and expectations and the version of yourself you perform for others versus the one that exists when no one is watching, and Jinx had written back: i get that. more than u probably think. the mask thing is kinda literal for me lol and the deflection through humor was so transparent and so familiar that Lux's heart had ached with recognition.

She thought about Jinx when she was with her friends constantly now. She tried not to let her thoughts pull her away from them, but she thought about Jinx in a way that added a layer to everything, an additional channel through which experience was processed. Something funny would happen and she would think about how to describe it in a note. Something interesting would come up in conversation and she would think about Jinx's perspective on it. She was collecting moments like a curator selecting pieces for an exhibit, each one chosen because she thought it would mean something to the person she was assembling it for.

"You're doing it again," Sarah complained.

This was a Wednesday evening. They were in Sarah's room, supposedly studying, though Sarah's version of studying involved a face mask and a glass of wine and her textbook open to a page she hadn't turned in forty-five minutes. Soraka was there too, cross-legged on the floor with actual flashcards, studying constantly and without apparent effort.

"Doing what?" Lux prompted, from her position on Sarah's bed with her laptop.

"Smiling at nothing. You've been doing it for weeks. It's becoming concerning."

"I'm not smiling at nothing."

"You're smiling at those sticky notes. I saw you buy a new pack at the bookstore yesterday. You bought the blue ones."

Lux felt heat rise to her cheeks. "They were on sale."

"They were not on sale. I was standing right there."

"I like blue."

"Your favorite color is gold. You have told me this no fewer than eight times. You told me this the day we met. It is one of the first things I learned about you."

Soraka looked up from her flashcards with a gentle, knowing expression that was somehow worse than Sarah's direct interrogation. "Is this about your roommate? The notes?"

"Her name is Jinx," Lux said, and the correction came out faster and with more emphasis than she'd intended, and both Sarah and Soraka looked at her, and she felt her blush deepen. "We've just been getting to know each other. Through the notes. It's nice. She's nice. That's all."

Sarah raised one perfectly shaped eyebrow but said nothing further, which was a mercy Lux didn't entirely deserve.

The following Friday brought a development that Lux had not planned for but that felt, in the way that certain unplanned things do, like it had been building toward itself for weeks.

The evening had started simply. Lux was hosting. The word "hosting" was generous for what amounted to inviting a handful of friends to her common room to sit around, eat snacks, and provide company while she tried to procrastinate on her policy analysis in a socially acceptable way. Ezreal was there, sprawled across the couch with his legs hanging over the armrest, scrolling through his phone. Kayn had come along with him and had claimed the floor beside the couch, sitting with his back against it in his characteristic position of aggressive relaxation. Sarah was perched on the counter beside the mini fridge, which Lux had asked her three times not to sit on and which Sarah continued to sit on because Sarah Fortune did not take direction from furniture. Soraka had brought tea in a thermos and was sharing it with Neeko, who Lux had started inviting to things after their conversation at Jayce's party and who brought a brightness to any gathering she was part of.

The common room was small, but it managed. With the couch, the counter space, and some creative floor-sitting, six people fit with the close, comfortable density of friends who didn't mind being in each other's space. The overhead light was off because Lux had strung fairy lights across the top of the walls weeks ago and their warm glow made everything look better. Someone had put music on through Ezreal's phone, something low and ambient that Kayn had chosen and that Lux wouldn't have picked but that worked surprisingly well as background noise.

They were deep into a conversation about the Spring Formal, specifically whether Lux's proposed theme of "Starlight Serenade" was, as Ezreal argued, "a banger name" or, as Kayn argued, "the title of a romance novel your grandmother reads," when the front door opened.

Lux heard the key in the lock first. Then the click of the mechanism. Then the door swung inward, and the conversation died like conversations do when an unexpected element enters the room, not with a full stop but with a trailing off, words fading like the end of a song as everyone turned to look.

Jinx stood in the doorway.

She was wearing the overalls again, the same ones or an identical pair, though these were slightly less stained than the ones from the drunk night. The white tank top underneath was visible where one strap had slipped off her shoulder, the cloud tattoos curling down her arm and across her collarbone in dark, intricate lines. Her hair was down this time, not in the twin braids Lux remembered but loose around her shoulders, and it was even more striking that way, a cascade of vivid electric blue that fell past her shoulders and caught the fairy light like it was made of something other than hair. Her welding mask was pushed up on top of her head again, resting there like an oversized headband. Her ears glinted with piercings. In one hand, she held a brown paper bag from the convenience store on the corner. In the other, she held a wrench. She did not appear to find anything about this combination unusual.

She looked at the room full of people. Six faces looked back at her.

There was a beat of silence.

"Oh," Jinx said. "There are a lot of people here."

Lux, from her spot on the couch, felt something happen inside her chest that she couldn't name. It was like the feeling of a key turning in a lock, a mechanism engaging, a thing clicking into the position it was always meant to occupy. She had seen Jinx once before, in the dark, through the haze of alcohol, and she had called her beautiful and meant it. Seeing her now, in the warm golden light of the fairy lights, sober and surrounded by her friends, was a completely different experience. It was seeing a painting you'd only ever viewed in a photograph. It was hearing a song live after only knowing the recording. It was the difference between knowing and understanding.

Jinx was not classically beautiful, not in the way that Lux's mother would use the word, not in the polished, symmetrical, carefully maintained way that the suitors' sisters and the society women at the Crownguard galas were beautiful. She was beautiful the way a thunderstorm was beautiful, or a city skyline at night, or a piece of machinery with all its gears exposed and turning. There was nothing curated about her. Everything was visible, the ink on her skin and the metal in her ears and the oil stains on her clothes and the wild color of her hair. She stood in the doorway of their shared common room holding a wrench and a bag of snacks and looking at a room full of strangers with an expression of genuine surprise that hadn't quite decided whether to become amusement or alarm, and Lux's heart was doing something complicated and persistent in her chest that she was going to have to deal with at some point but that she was absolutely not going to deal with right now.

"Hey!" Lux's voice came out brighter than intended, pitched up by an octave of feeling she hadn't authorized. She stood up from the couch. "Everyone, this is Jinx. My roommate. Jinx, this is everyone."

Jinx surveyed the room with those wide, pale eyes. She didn't look uncomfortable, exactly. She looked like she was rapidly processing an equation she hadn't prepared for and running calculations on the best approach, and whatever algorithm she was using apparently produced a result she found acceptable, because her expression shifted from surprise to a grin that was wide and slightly crooked and utterly disarming.

"Sup," she said, and stepped inside, and let the door close behind her.

What happened next was something Lux would think about for days afterward, turning it over in her mind the way you turn a stone in your hand, examining it from every angle.

Jinx blended in.

She didn’t blend in the way that meant she disappeared or became invisible or smoothed herself into the group's existing dynamic. Jinx was not a person built for disappearing. She blended the way a new color blends into a painting, distinct and vivid and impossible to ignore, but somehow exactly what the composition needed. She sat on the floor near Kayn, who looked at her with the evaluating stare he gave everyone and apparently found whatever he was looking for because he gave a single nod of acknowledgment that was, for Kayn, practically a standing ovation. She opened her paper bag, which contained an assortment of convenience store snacks in flavors and combinations that Lux would have considered inadvisable, and offered them to the room with a generosity that was casual and genuine.

Ezreal, being Ezreal, introduced himself with his full name and a handshake and the confident smile that was his default setting. Jinx shook his hand, looked at him for a moment, and said "You have explorer energy. Like, I'm going to touch a cursed artifact in a tomb despite everyone telling me not to energy," and Ezreal looked so pleased by this assessment that Lux thought he might actually cry.

Sarah regarded Jinx with the appraising look of a woman who recognized another woman who didn't give a damn what people thought of her, and a mutual respect established itself between them in the span of approximately thirty seconds and zero words.

Soraka offered tea. Jinx accepted it with a politeness that surprised Lux, not because she thought Jinx was impolite but because the careful way she took the cup and thanked Soraka felt like a different register than the casual bravado she'd entered with, something softer and more deliberate.

Neeko told Jinx that her aura was "like fireworks, all the colors at once, very exciting," and Jinx said back "I've been told I have that effect on people" with a grin that made Neeko laugh.

Within twenty minutes, Jinx was sitting cross-legged on the floor between Kayn and Soraka, gesturing with a half-eaten candy bar, telling a story about a project in her robotics lab that had apparently resulted in a small fire, a medium-sized explosion, and Professor Viktor saying the words "I'm not angry, I'm recalculating" in a tone that suggested he was, in fact, very angry. The story was told with the same chaotic energy as her notes, bouncing between details, circling back, building to a punchline that she delivered with impeccable timing, and the room laughed, all of them, genuine and full, and Lux watched from the couch and felt something settle inside her like a piece of a puzzle finding its place.

She watched the way Jinx talked with her hands, always in motion, fingers drawing shapes in the air as though she was building something invisible as she spoke. She watched the way Jinx's eyes moved around the room, quick and alert, taking everything in, reading the dynamic of the group with an intelligence that her casualness belied. She watched the way Jinx laughed at Ezreal's jokes, the real ones that were actually funny, with that same bright, startled laugh that Lux had first heard in the dark. She watched the way Jinx's blue hair fell across her shoulders when she leaned forward to make a point, and the way the fairy lights caught the metal in her ears and the ink on her skin, and the way she sat with one knee pulled up and her arm draped across it, relaxed and present and alive in a way that filled the room.

Lux liked her.

The thought arrived with the quiet certainty of something that had been true for a while and was only now being acknowledged. She liked Jinx. Not just as a name on a note or a mystery behind a door or a set of characteristics assembled from secondhand evidence. She liked the actual person, the one who was sitting on her floor eating convenience store candy and making her friends laugh and fitting into Lux's life like she'd always been part of it.

And Lux didn't quite realize, in that moment, how much she liked her. She registered it as warmth, as ease, as the particular happiness of seeing someone you care about be accepted by other people you care about. She filed it under friendship and gratitude and the satisfaction of a connection finally made physical after weeks of existing only on paper.

But at that moment, she didn't realize that the feeling was deeper than that.

"So," Ezreal started, during a lull in the conversation, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and the expression he wore when he was about to ask something personal, "Jinx, what's with the welding mask?"

Jinx reached up and tapped the mask where it sat on top of her head. "This? I was in the workshop. I come from the workshop. I go to the workshop. The workshop is my life. Occasionally I sleep. The mask stays on because I forget it's there."

"Do you just walk around campus like that?"

"Yeah. People get out of your way faster when they think you might be about to weld something."

"That's actually genius."

"I know."

The night wound down gradually, the way good nights do, not ending so much as easing to a close. People left in ones and twos, Neeko first because she had an early class, then Soraka, then Sarah with a wave and a pointed look at Lux that contained volumes of unspoken commentary. Ezreal and Kayn were last, Ezreal giving Jinx a fist bump on his way out that she returned with matching enthusiasm and Kayn giving her another one of his silent nods, which was, Lux knew, the highest compliment in his emotional vocabulary.

Then it was just the two of them.

The common room was quiet, the fairy lights still glowing, the remnants of snacks scattered across the counter and the floor. Jinx was still sitting in her spot on the floor, legs stretched out now, the wrench she'd been carrying set beside her like a loyal pet. Lux was on the couch, her legs tucked under her, and the space between them felt warm and close in a way that was different from how it had felt with the others present. It felt… more real.

"Your friends are cool," Jinx said, looking up at Lux from the floor. "Ezreal's like a golden retriever in human form and I mean that as the highest compliment I'm capable of giving."

"He would be thrilled to hear you say that."

"The tall scary one, Kayn? He's got some stuff going on. Like, probably a lot of stuff. But I respect it."

"He grows on you."

"Like a fungus?"

"I was going to say like a friend, but sure."

Jinx grinned. That crooked, wide grin that took up her whole face and made her eyes crinkle at the corners and did something specific and unignorable to the rhythm of Lux's heartbeat.

"I should crash," Jinx said, not making any move to get up. "I've got a project due Monday that I haven't started and I told Viktor I was seventy percent done in an email yesterday, which was a lie, I'm zero percent done, but it'll be fine."

"How is that going to be fine?"

"I do my best work in a state of absolute panic. It's a system."

"That is not a system. That has got to be a cry for help."

"Are those really that mutually exclusive?"

Lux laughed, and Jinx laughed with her, and the sound of their laughter together in the small, warm room felt like something worth remembering.

Jinx left for her room after that, wrench in hand, with a casual "Night, bright eyes" tossed over her shoulder, and Lux sat on the couch for a long time after her door closed, surrounded by fairy light and the fading echo of a good evening, and she did not let herself examine too closely the reason she was smiling.

The next encounter happened on a Tuesday.

Lux had a two o'clock class, a guest lecture series on Ionian diplomatic history that the Political Science department ran every spring, and she was returning to the dorm afterward with the particular mental fatigue that came from two hours of dense geopolitical analysis. The campus was busy with the mid-afternoon rush, students moving between classes and buildings, and the first real warmth of the approaching spring was in the air, soft and promising.

She turned the corner into the Eastside Residential hallway and stopped.

Jinx was sitting on the floor outside their suite door.

She was sitting with her back against the door, her legs stretched out in front of her, her head tipped back against the wood with her eyes closed. She was wearing the overalls, because she was apparently always wearing the overalls, though today's tank top was black instead of white, and the cloud tattoos wound up her bare arm in stark contrast. No welding mask today. Her blue hair was in the twin braids again, falling over her shoulders and pooling on the ground beside her. She looked, to a casual observer, like she might be dead, except for the slow, even rise and fall of her chest that indicated she was merely asleep.

On the floor beside her was a half-eaten granola bar and what appeared to be a screwdriver.

Lux stood there for a moment, caught between concern and an involuntary rush of fondness that she felt all through her chest. Then she crouched down in front of Jinx and put a gentle hand on her shoulder.

"Jinx?"

The response was immediate and startling. Jinx's eyes snapped open, wide and alert, the pale blue-grey of them almost luminous in the fluorescent hallway lighting, and she jerked forward so fast that Lux had to lean back to avoid a collision.

"I wasn't asleep," Jinx said, with the absolute authority of someone who was definitely asleep.

"You were completely asleep."

"I was resting my eyes. There's a scientific difference. I could cite sources."

"Why are you on the floor outside our door?"

Our.

Jinx's expression shifted from defensive alertness to sheepish recognition. She rubbed the back of her neck with one hand, a gesture that was so unexpectedly endearing that Lux felt her heart do the complicated thing again.

"So," Jinx said. "Funny story. I left this morning to go to the workshop. And in my defense, it was very early and I was running on about two hours of sleep and half a granola bar, which, as you can see, I did not finish." She gestured to the evidence beside her. "And I may have forgotten my phone. And my keys. Both of them. In my room. Behind a door that is locked."

Lux looked at the suite door, then at Jinx, then back at the door. "How long have you been sitting here?"

"What time is it?"

"Two-thirty."

Jinx did some mental math, which manifested as her looking at the ceiling and moving her lips silently. "About four hours."

"Four hours? Jinx, why didn't you go to the housing office? They have spare keys."

"Because the housing office is on the other side of campus and that's like a twenty-minute walk and I was already sitting down and honestly, once you've committed to sitting on a floor, it's really hard to uncommit. There's a gravity to it. Literally."

"You could have asked someone in the hall to call me."

"I don't know your number. It's not on any of the notes. We have a paper-based communication system, Lux. It has limitations."

Lux stared at her. Then she laughed, one of those laughs that starts in the belly and works its way up, and she sat down on the hallway floor across from Jinx because standing felt wrong when Jinx was down here, and because something about the situation, the absurdity and the warmth and the image of Jinx patiently sitting outside their door for four hours rather than walk twenty minutes to a solution, was so perfectly, completely Jinx that it transcended frustration and landed squarely in the territory of affection.

"Let's get you inside," Lux said, pulling her key from her bag.

"Wait." Jinx put a hand on Lux's arm, and the contact, casual and brief, sent a small current through Lux's skin that she attributed to static electricity and absolutely nothing else. "You don't have somewhere to be?"

Lux thought about it. Her next class wasn't until tomorrow. Her study group had been canceled. She had planned to spend the afternoon working on her essay, but the essay had been her plan every afternoon for the last week and she'd been finding increasingly creative reasons to defer it.

"No," she answered. "I'm free."

Jinx looked at her, and something in her expression softened, the sharp edges rounding out into something quieter and more open. The hallway was empty around them. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Somewhere down the corridor, a door opened and closed and footsteps faded into nothing.

"Cool," Jinx said. "Me too."

They went inside. Lux unlocked the suite door and the two stepped in. Jinx retrieved her phone and keys from her desk with the sheepish gratitude of someone accepting a pardon, and then, rather than retreating to their respective bedrooms the way they always had before, the two ended up on the couch.

It was not intentional, nor with any spoken agreement. It happened the way certain things do when two people are comfortable enough to let gravity decide. Lux sat on one end and Jinx sat on the other and the space between them was small enough to feel close but wide enough to feel safe, and they talked.

Really talked. Not through medium of notes or through the mediating distance of paper and pen and a mini fridge between them. Face to face, voice to voice, in the warm afternoon light that came through the common room's small window and painted everything in tones of gold.

They talked about small things first. Classes. Campus. The dining hall chicken, which Jinx maintained was a biohazard and which Lux defended with less conviction than she used to. They talked about Jayce's party, which Jinx had heard about but not attended because she'd been in the workshop until some point in the morning building a prototype for a project she described as "a drone, but with personality," a phrase Lux didn't fully understand but found compelling.

Then the conversation deepened, the way conversations do when two people stop performing and start being present, when the social machinery of small talk winds down and what's left is genuine curiosity and the willingness to be known.

"Can I ask you something?" Lux said, tucking her feet under her on the couch.

"You just did, but sure, go for another one."

"The welding mask. Is it just for the workshop, or is it also for something else?"

Jinx was quiet for a moment, which was unusual enough to be noticeable. She was sitting with one leg pulled up, her arm draped across her knee, the mirror of the position she'd taken the other night. Her braids fell over her shoulders and her eyes were fixed on some middle distance, not avoiding Lux but thinking.

"Both," she revealed, finally. "I mean, yeah, I need it for welding, obviously. I like my retinas where they are. But it's also like, I don't know. A buffer? Between me and everything else. Like when I have the mask on, I'm just the girl in the workshop. Nobody's looking at my face. Nobody's trying to read me. I'm just hands and tools and whatever I'm making. It's easier."

"Easier than what?"

"Than being looked at." Jinx said it simply, without drama, a statement of fact about herself delivered with the same casualness as telling someone your favorite color. "People look at me and they see the hair and the tattoos and the piercings and they make a whole story about who I am before I've said a word. The mask helps. It means I get to just be a person doing a thing. No story required."

Lux understood that. She understood it with a depth that surprised her, because her own version of the same impulse looked completely different on the surface but came from the same place. Lux's mask was the smile. The brightness. The warmth that she projected like a searchlight so that no one would think to look for anything dimmer beneath it.

"I get that," Lux said. "More than you probably think."

Jinx looked at her, and the echo of her own note from weeks ago hung between them, recognized and unspoken. She smiled, not the wide, crooked grin, but something smaller and more private.

"Yeah," Jinx said. "I bet you do."

They talked for hours. The afternoon light shifted through the window, moving across the floor in a slow arc, and neither of them moved from the couch. Jinx told Lux about growing up in Zaun, the real version, not the abbreviated one from the notes, and it was more complicated and more painful than Lux had gathered from the careful, humor-deflected references. Foster homes. Moving around. The sister she hadn't seen in a long time, whose name was Vi, a single syllable that Jinx said with a weight that seemed too heavy for two letters.

"We got separated," Jinx spoke, and her voice was steady but her hands were not, fidgeting with the cuff of her overalls the way they fidgeted with everything, always building or dismantling something, even if the something was just the frayed edge of fabric. "I was really young. She was older, old enough to try to fight it, but not old enough to win. You know how it is. Or, I guess you don't, which is fine, that's a good thing. But yeah. One day she was there and then she wasn't and it's been about ten years."

"Do you know where she is?"

"No." A beat. "I've looked on and off. The system doesn't make it easy. It's like trying to find a specific drop of water after it's gone into the ocean."

"I'm sorry, Jinx."

"Don't be. It is what it is." She said this with a practiced ease that didn't quite cover the rawness underneath, and Lux recognized that too, the cadence of someone who had told this story to themselves so many times that the words had worn smooth, a pebble in the mouth, always there.

In return, Lux told Jinx about her family. The real version. Not the sanitized one she gave acquaintances, the one that emphasized tradition and legacy and the honor of the Crownguard name, but the version that included her mother's relentless control and the suffocating expectations and the suitors who showed up at the house like seasonal weather, predictable and unwelcome. She told Jinx more about Garen, and how his absence for military deployment had left her without the one ally she had in that house. She told her about the way her mother looked at her sometimes, evaluating, like Lux was a project that hadn't turned out quite right and might still be corrected if the right pressure was applied in the right places.

"She sounds like a real gem," Jinx rolled her eyes, with a flatness that made Lux laugh despite the heaviness of the subject.

"She's complicated."

"Complicated is a word people use when they mean 'terrible but I'm not allowed to say that because they're family.' I'm giving you permission to say that."

"She's not terrible. She's just very invested in a specific version of my future that I'm not sure I want."

"What do you want?"

Lux opened her mouth to answer, and found that she didn't have one ready. The question sat between them, large and simple and unexpectedly difficult, and Jinx waited, patient in that way she rarely was, giving Lux the space to think.

"I don't know," Lux said, honestly. "I know what I don't want. I don't want the suitors. I don't want to be a political wife or a family legacy or whatever my mother is building me toward. I want to feel like my life is mine. Like the choices I make are because I made them, not because someone made them for me and I just followed the script."

"Then don't follow her script."

"It's not that simple."

"It's exactly that simple. It's just not that easy. There's a difference."

Lux looked at Jinx, and Jinx looked back at her, and the common room was warm and quiet and the light through the window had gone from gold to the deeper amber of late afternoon, and Lux thought about how strange and wonderful it was that this conversation was happening here, on a couch, with a girl she'd communicated with through sticky notes for months and met face to face less than a handful of times, and it felt more real and more honest than any conversation she'd had in years.

"When's your spring break?" Lux asked, partly because she was curious and partly because she wasn't ready for the conversation to end and changing the subject was a way to extend it. Jinx could have had a class or two, or the opposite, that meant her break was technically shorter or longer.

"Probably the same as yours."

"Are you going home?"

Something flickered across Jinx's face, quick and contained. "No. I don't really have a home to go to. I mean, I have a place. The last foster family. But it's not really a home situation. More of a mailing-address situation." She shrugged, one shoulder, casual. "I was just going to stay on campus. The workshop's open over break and I've got projects I want to work on. It's actually nice when the campus empties out. It’s quiet. Less people looking at me funny for carrying power tools across the quad."

"You'd be alone for the whole week?"

"I'm alone a lot. It's fine. I'm good at being alone."

Lux's brain, which had been processing this information with increasing speed, produced an idea. The idea arrived fully formed, like a blueprint unfurled on a table, and it was either brilliant or insane and Lux suspected it might be both.

"Come home with me," she blurted out.

Jinx's eyebrows rose. Both of them, high, the way they did when she was genuinely surprised rather than performing surprise for comedic effect. "Excuse me?"

"For spring break. Come home with me to Demacia."

"To your house? The one with the mother who sounds like a final boss in a video game?"

"Yes. Okay, hear me out." Lux shifted on the couch, turning to face Jinx more fully, and the words came fast because the idea was crystallizing as she spoke and she could feel the rightness of it settling into place. "Every spring, my family hosts this gala. It's a huge deal, like five hundred people, incredibly formal, incredibly boring, and my mother uses it as an opportunity to parade me in front of eligible bachelors like I'm a prize horse at auction. I hate it. Every year I hate it. But I can't get out of going because it's a family obligation and Crownguards don't skip obligations."

"Okay, and where do I fit into this nightmare?"

"If I bring a friend, a guest, someone who's with me for the week, my mother will be so focused on being a proper hostess that she'll ease up on the suitor thing. She can't throw men at me all evening if I have someone by my side who she has to be polite to. You'd be like a buffer. A social buffer."

Jinx stared at her. The expression on her face was a complicated one, layers of surprise and amusement and something underneath both that looked almost like vulnerability. "You want me to come to a fancy rich-person gala as your social shield."

"I want you to come to spring break with me so you're not alone on a deserted campus for a week. The social shield thing is just merely a bonus."

"Lux, I'm a foster kid from Zaun who wears welding masks recreationally and has cloud tattoos on half of her body. I don't think your mother is going to be thrilled about me."

"My mother doesn't have to be thrilled. She has to be polite. And she will be, because appearances matter to her more than anything, and being rude to a guest in her home would be an appearance she can't afford."

Jinx was quiet. She was looking at Lux with those wide, pale eyes, and Lux could practically see the gears turning behind them, the calculations running, the risk assessment being compiled and evaluated. It occurred to Lux, suddenly, that this might be too much. Too forward. Too soon. They'd only properly talked in person like twice now and she was inviting this girl to her family home for a week, into the most personal and fraught arena of her life, and maybe that was the kind of too-much that even Jinx, who didn't seem to have a concept of too-much, would balk at.

"You don't have to," Lux added, quickly. "It's totally fine if you'd rather stay. I just thought, since you were going to be alone anyway, and I could use the company, and the gala would be way more bearable with someone there who would actually make it interesting instead of excruciating, that maybe it could be good. For both of us."

"Will there be free food?"

"There will be extremely expensive free food."

"Like, how expensive are we talking?"

"There will be a raw bar with oysters and champagne and a dessert table that takes up an entire wall."

Jinx appeared to weigh this information with genuine gravity. Then something shifted in her expression, the wariness giving way to something brighter, a decision made, a leap taken. The crooked grin returned.

"Yeah," she grinned wide. "Okay. Let's do it."

"Really?"

"Really. Worst case scenario, I get free oysters and your mom hates me. Best case scenario, I get free oysters and your mom really hates me."

Lux laughed, bright and full and surprised by her own relief, and Jinx laughed with her, and the decision settled between them with the weight of something that was going to matter more than either of them currently understood.

The days between the decision and departure passed in a blur of preparations and mounting anticipation that Lux felt like a low, constant current running beneath everything else. She finished her policy analysis. She attended her last round of classes before break. She packed with the methodical thoroughness of someone who knew exactly what to bring: the right clothes, the right shoes, the right accessories, the right armor, because going home was always, in some way, going into battle.

She also packed a second suitcase of things she thought Jinx might need and wouldn't think to bring, extra toiletries, a nicer jacket in case the evenings were cold, a book in case she got bored. Lux was aware that this was probably excessive. She did it anyway.

The notes on the fridge took on a new energy in the days leading up to the trip. Logistics were exchanged. Flight details. What to pack (Lux's suggestion: smart casual for the dinners, something comfortable for the travel day, and don't forget a toothbrush). Jinx's response to packing advice was a drawing of a stick figure throwing a wrench and a granola bar into a suitcase, captioned: ready.

On the Thursday before break, Lux left a note that said: Are you sure you're okay with this? I know it's a lot and I won't be offended if you change your mind.

Jinx's response came with a small drawing of the monkey, Kiki Thunderfist III, wearing what appeared to be a tiny tuxedo: bright eyes. i'm sure. plus kiki wants to see a mansion. who am i to deny him.

Lux smiled at the note for a long time.

The flight to Demacia was three hours. Lux had booked the tickets in advance as soon as she could, as soon as Jinx agreed, choosing seats together in a window-aisle pair because she suspected Jinx would want the window and she was right. Jinx pressed her face to the glass during takeoff with the unguarded wonder of someone who had never flown before, which, it turned out, she hadn't.

"The buildings look like a circuit board," Jinx said, her breath fogging the window. "Look. The streets are the connections and the buildings are the components. The whole city is just one big machine."

Lux leaned over to look, and their shoulders touched, and she registered the warmth of it and the smell of metal and something sharp that she'd come to associate specifically with Jinx.

"You see engineering in everything, don't you?"

"Everything is engineering. The universe is just a really ambitious project with questionable quality control."

They talked for most of the flight. Lux briefed Jinx on her family the way a diplomat might brief a colleague before a state dinner, because that was essentially what this was. Her mother, Augatha Crownguard, matriarch, pillar of Demacian society, donor to fourteen charities and patron of six cultural institutions, a woman whose warmth was precisely calibrated to the social standing of the person it was directed at. Her father, who was largely absent due to his work in government and who existed in Lux's life more as a concept than a presence. Her Aunt Tianna, who might or might not be present for the gala and who was best navigated by agreeing with everything she said and then doing whatever you wanted once she'd moved on to someone else. And Garen.

"Remember, Garen's the good one," Lux informed, and her voice warmed the way it always did when she talked about her brother. "He's in the military. He's stationed overseas right now but he's coming home for the gala. He's the only person in my family who actually sees me as a person and not a, I don't know, a brand extension."

"An extension?"

"That's what it feels like sometimes. Like I'm not Luxanna Crownguard, I'm Crownguard Luxanna. The family comes first, even in the name."

"I don't have a last name," Jinx said, and it was delivered with the same casual flatness she used for the things that hurt, the things she'd said so many times they'd gone smooth. "I mean, I have one on paper. But it's not really mine. It's just whatever the system assigned. So I get the name thing, from the other direction. You've got too much of one and I've got none."

Lux didn't say anything for a moment. Then she reached over and put her hand on Jinx's, briefly, just a touch, a press of warmth.

"Well, Jinx is a good name," she said. "It's yours."

Jinx looked at her, and something in those wide, pale eyes flickered like a candle in a draft, and then she smiled, small and real.

"Yeah," she looked down. "It is."

The plane descended into Demacia in the late afternoon, and the city spread below them like something from a painting. Demacia was nothing like Piltover. Where Piltover was steel and glass and progress, Demacia was stone and tradition and a beauty that came from age rather than innovation. The skyline was all spires and grand facades, marble and granite, everything bathed in the golden light of a sun that seemed to shine on Demacia differently than it shone on anywhere else, as if even the weather understood the importance of appearances here.

A car was waiting for them at the airport. Not a taxi, not a rideshare, but a sleek black town car that looked somewhat like a limousine with a driver who greeted Lux by name and took their bags with the smooth professionalism of someone who had been doing this for years. Jinx stopped walking when she saw it.

"That's our car," her eyes nearly sparkled.

"Yes."

"That's our car that comes with a driver."

"Yes."

"A driver who calls you by name."

"He's been with the family for a while. His name is Marcus. He's nice."

"Lux." Jinx turned to look at her, and her expression was the one she got when she was recalculating. "When you said your family was well-off, exactly how well-off did you mean?"

Lux hesitated. She'd been vague about the extent of the Crownguard wealth, partly because it made her uncomfortable and partly because she'd worried it would change the dynamic between them. "Pretty well-off," she finally said.

"Define pretty."

"Get in the car and you'll see."

The drive from the airport to the Crownguard estate took twenty minutes through increasingly grand neighborhoods, the houses growing larger and more impressive as they went, surrounded by manicured grounds and gated drives and the kind of tasteful landscaping that whispered of wealth without shouting it. Jinx watched out the window with wide eyes, and Lux watched Jinx watch, and the nervous energy in her stomach grew with each passing mile.

When the car turned onto the long, tree-lined drive that led to the Crownguard home, Jinx made a sound. It was not a word. It was more like the verbal equivalent of a blue screen of death, a short, sharp exhale that contained an entire renegotiation of her understanding of the world.

The house was, objectively, ridiculous. Lux knew this. She had always known this, the way you know a thing you grew up with that everyone else finds extraordinary. The Crownguard estate was a sprawling manor of pale stone and tall windows, three stories of classical architecture set back from the drive behind a circular fountain and formal gardens that were, even in early spring, immaculate. The front entrance alone featured columns and a portico that would have been at home on a government building, and the wings of the house extended to either side with the casual enormity of a structure that had been added to over generations by people who had never needed to ask how much anything cost.

"Lux," Jinx whispered, and her voice was very quiet.

"Yeah?"

"This is not well-off. Well-off is a nice apartment. This is a castle. This is where a Disney princess lives."

"It's not a castle."

"There are turrets. I can see turrets!"

"Those are just decorative."

"What kind of people have decorative turrets?"

The car pulled up to the front entrance and Marcus opened their doors. Jinx stepped out and stood on the gravel drive, looking up at the house with an expression of pure, unfiltered awe that she was making no effort to conceal. Her blue braids caught the late afternoon sun. Her overalls were slightly wrinkled from the flight. She had Kiki Thunderfist III's small brown form sticking out of her front pocket, because she had insisted on bringing him and Lux hadn't had the heart or the desire to talk her out of it.

She looked entirely out of place and entirely, perfectly herself.

"Come on," Lux said, touching her elbow gently. "I'll show you inside."

Inside was worse, or better, depending on your perspective. The foyer alone was larger than some apartments, all marble floors and high ceilings and a sweeping staircase that curved upward toward the second floor like something from a period film. Fresh flowers stood in arrangements on every available surface, and the light that poured through the tall windows was warm and golden and made everything glow. Portraits of Crownguard ancestors lined the walls, stern-faced men and women in formal attire, a gallery of expectations rendered in oil paint.

A woman appeared from a side hallway. She was in a maid's uniform, crisp and dark, and she greeted Lux with the practiced warmth of staff who had known her since childhood. "Welcome home, Miss Crownguard. Your mother is in the east parlor. She asked that you come see her when you've settled in."

"Thank you, Mira. This is my friend Jinx. She'll be staying in the blue guest room."

Mira gave Jinx a polite smile and a nod. If she had any thoughts about the blue-haired girl in dirty overalls with a stuffed monkey in her pocket standing in the Crownguard foyer, she kept them behind a professionalism that had clearly been honed over many years.

"I'll have her bags taken up," Mira said, and disappeared as smoothly as she'd arrived.

Jinx turned to Lux. "The blue guest room? There's more than one guest room?"

"There are seven. The blue one is the nicest and it has a view of the garden."

"Holy shit. Your house has seven guest rooms and a foyer and a woman who appears from hallways and decorative turrets."

"I’m sorry… I… I know it's a lot."

"A lot is a generous word. This is a whole other planet. I grew up sharing a bathroom and your foyer has more square footage than my entire house."

Lux winced, guilt flaring sharp and familiar. She'd been worried about this, about the gap between their worlds being too visible, too stark, about Jinx feeling uncomfortable or out of place in a way that couldn't be smoothed over with friendly reassurance. "I'm sorry. I should have prepared you better. I didn't want to make a whole thing about it because it's just a house, it's where I grew up, and it doesn't mean anything about me as a person and it definitely doesn't mean anything about you."

"Hey." Jinx held up a hand. "I'm not upset or scared or anything, I'm just taking it all in. Give me like thirty seconds to process the existence of everything here and I'll be fine."

Lux waited. Jinx looked around the foyer one more time, her eyes tracking across the marble and the portraits and the flowers, and then she looked back at Lux and grinned, wide and crooked and genuine.

"Okay," she said. "I'm good. Show me the blue guest room. I want to see if the bed is bigger than my first apartment."

The answer was: yes. 

The blue guest room was on the second floor, at the end of a hallway lined with more portraits and a carpet so thick it seemed to absorb sound. The room itself was spacious and elegant, decorated in shades of blue and cream that Lux had always found calming. A four-poster bed dominated the center, dressed in pale blue linens with more pillows than any reasonable person needed. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the rear garden, where the topiary and hedges were just beginning to green after winter. There was a writing desk, a sitting area with two upholstered chairs, a private bathroom with a claw-foot tub, and a wardrobe that was currently empty but large enough to park a small car in.

Jinx stood in the middle of the room and turned in a slow circle, taking it all in.

"This room," she began, carefully, "is the size of my whole house at home. My whole house. Where I live with a family."

"I know."

"There's a bathtub with feet."

"Claw-foot, yes."

"Lux, the bathtub has feet. Your bathtub is wearing shoes."

Lux pressed her lips together very hard to keep from laughing, because Jinx's face was doing something between amazement and existential crisis and both of those deserved to be taken seriously, even if the shoes comment was objectively hilarious.

"If you need anything, my room is just down the hall," Lux said. "And there's a bell system, I know that sounds medieval but it's how the house works, if you press the button by the door someone from staff will come and help with whatever you need."

"Like a hotel?"

"Yes."

"Woah… so I’m staying in a hotel that's also your house."

"That's one way to describe it."

Jinx sat on the edge of the bed and bounced experimentally. The mattress absorbed the impact with the effortless give of something very, very expensive. She pulled Kiki Thunderfist III from her pocket and set him on one of the many pillows, where he looked extremely small and extremely content.

"Kiki's never had this good," Jinx said. "He's living his best life."

Lux smiled, and the nervous energy in her stomach was still there but it was mixed with something warmer now, something that came from seeing Jinx here, in this place that had always felt like a gilded cage, and watching her strip away its pretension with nothing more than honesty and humor.

Then Jinx's expression shifted, the wonder fading into something more serious.

"Lux," her eyes widened, and her voice was different, quieter, stripped of the comedy. "I don't have anything to wear. To the gala, I mean. I've got what I packed, which is basically more overalls and some t-shirts and the one pair of jeans I own that doesn't have paint on them. I didn't really think about the dress code because I didn't know your house had turrets and bell systems and seven guest rooms. I thought it was going to be like, a nice house. Not fucking Buckingham Palace."

"Oh, don't worry about that."

"It's hard not to worry about it when I'm sitting in a room that costs more than my scholarship and now I understand the actual scale of how rich this gala is going to be."

"No, Jinx, I said don't worry because I already thought about it. I'll have one of the family's stylists pull some options for you. They'll find things in your size and style, and you can choose whatever you're comfortable in. All you have to do is show up."

Jinx looked at her for a long moment, that evaluating gaze that Lux had learned meant she was processing something she didn't quite know how to respond to. "You planned for this."

"I planned for everything. It's what I do."

"You're like a very pretty army general. All strategy and contingencies."

"I've been called worse."

The corner of Jinx's mouth twitched upward. "Has anyone ever told you that you take care of people like it's your job?"

"My brother says that all the time."

"Your brother sounds smart."

"Don't tell him that. His head's big enough from the military."

Jinx laughed, and the tension broke, and Lux felt the knot in her chest ease just a fraction.

The family dinner that evening was held in the formal dining room because the Crownguard household did not have informal dinners. The room was long and high-ceilinged, with a table that could seat twenty but was set tonight for five: Lux, Jinx, Augatha Crownguard, and Garen, who had arrived that afternoon from his overseas posting and who Lux had nearly knocked over with the force of her hug when she'd seen him standing in the foyer.

Garen Crownguard was a large man. Large that was not just tall or broad but occupying space with an authority that was physical and also temperamental, as though the world had made him bigger to match the size of his personality. He had the Crownguard coloring, brown hair and strong features, and he was still in his travel clothes when Lux found him, rumpled from the flight but grinning the moment he saw her.

"Little light!" He caught her in a hug that lifted her feet off the ground.

"Garen! Put me down, agh- you're going to break my ribs."

"Your ribs are fine. You Crownguards are built sturdy. How's school? Are you eating? You look thin."

"I look the same as I did at Christmas."

"You looked thin at Christmas too."

"You say that every time."

"And I'll keep saying it until you eat a steak."

The dinner itself was an exercise in managed tension. Augatha Crownguard presided from the head of the table with the serene authority of someone who considered every meal an opportunity to reinforce the household hierarchy. She was an imposing woman, not physically, she was actually shorter than Lux, but in presence, in the way she held herself and the precision of her speech and the way her gaze could make a room feel like it was being appraised for auction.

She had greeted Jinx with a politeness so smooth it was almost invisible, a handshake, a welcome, a comment about how nice it was that Lux had brought a friend, all delivered with a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. Lux could see her cataloguing Jinx the way she catalogued everything: the hair, the tattoos visible at the neckline of the nicer shirt Jinx had changed into for dinner, the piercings, the general bearing of a girl from Zaun in a house full of Demacian crystal and silver.

To her credit, Jinx handled it with more grace than Lux had expected. She was quieter than usual, more contained, the volume of her personality dialed down in a way that Lux recognized as adaptive behavior, the instinct of someone who had learned to read rooms and adjust accordingly. She said please and thank you and complimented the food and answered Augatha's questions about her studies with clarity and intelligence that clearly caught Lux's mother off guard, because the woman's expression shifted several times during the conversation from polite tolerance to genuine interest, however briefly.

Garen, for his part, was Garen. Warm and loud and present, filling the silences that Augatha's formality created, telling stories from his deployment that he edited for dinner-table appropriateness and asking Jinx questions with a straightforward curiosity that had nothing evaluative in it. He was interested because she was interesting, and he didn't seem to notice or care about anything that his mother was cataloguing.

About halfway through the main course, a moment happened that Lux would replay in her head many times in the days that followed.

Jinx was telling Garen about her robotics project, the drone with personality, and she was becoming more animated as she talked, the volume of her personality turning back up because Garen's genuine interest made it safe to do so, and her hands were moving the way they always did, drawing shapes in the air. At one point she reached for her water glass and Lux, without thinking, moved it closer to her hand so she wouldn't have to stretch across her plate. It was a small gesture, automatic and unconscious, the kind of thing you do for someone you're attuned to, and Lux didn't even register that she'd done it.

Garen did.

He watched the exchange with the observant eyes of a military man and the knowing gaze of a brother, and when Jinx turned back to her plate, he caught Lux's eye across the table and raised one eyebrow.

After the main course, while dessert was being brought out and Augatha had excused herself briefly to take a phone call, Garen leaned over to Lux with the conspiratorial air of someone about to enjoy himself immensely.

"So," he said, and his voice was low but not low enough, the man had never been good at whispering, "are you two dating?"

The question hit Lux like a splash of cold water. She felt heat rush to her face with a speed and intensity that was physically uncomfortable, a blush so thorough it probably reached her collarbones.

"What? No. Garen, no. She's my roommate. We're friends."

"You moved her water glass for her."

"She was reaching for it."

"You moved it before she was reaching for it. You anticipated the reach. That's not a friend thing, little light."

"I pay attention to my friends."

"Not like that you don't."

Lux glanced at Jinx, who was sitting across the table looking at both of them with an expression that suggested she had heard every word of Garen's terrible whisper. Her cheeks, Lux noticed with a shock that went through her like a current, were pink. Jinx was blushing. Jinx, who Lux had never seen be anything less than composed in her own chaotic way, was blushing.

"We're not dating," Jinx butt in, but looking down to her plate, with a casualness that was undermined entirely by the color in her face.

"Of course not," Garen relented, with the satisfied tone of a man who had accomplished exactly what he'd set out to do. "My mistake."

The rest of dinner passed in a state of heightened awareness that Lux spent considerable energy trying to conceal. She was suddenly conscious of every interaction between her and Jinx, every glance and every small gesture, analyzing them through the lens Garen had placed over them and finding, to her alarm, that they looked different from this angle. Warmer. More deliberate. More like the behavior of someone who wasn't just paying attention but who couldn't help paying attention, for whom attention had become a gravitational pull rather than a conscious choice.

After dinner, walking back through the hallway toward the guest wing, Jinx bumped her shoulder against Lux's.

"Your brother's funny," she chuckled.

"He's mortifying."

"He's both. That's what makes him good."

"I'm sorry about the dating thing. He was just being Garen."

"It's fine." A beat. "Is it fine?"

"Is what fine?"

"That he said that. The uh, the dating thing. Are you, like, bothered by it?"

Lux looked at Jinx, who was looking at the floor, which was unusual because Jinx usually looked at everything head-on, and the pink was still in her cheeks, faint but there, and something about the question and the way it was asked made Lux's heart rate do something she would later describe as medically concerning.

"No," Lux said, and she meant it fully. "I'm not bothered by it. Are you?"

"No."

They walked in silence for a few steps. The hallway was long and quiet and their footsteps were soft on the thick carpet.

"Cool," Jinx said.

"Cool," Lux said.

They said goodnight at the door of the blue guest room, and Lux went to her own room and lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about water glasses and blushes and the word "cool" and the specific way Jinx had looked at the floor instead of at her.

She was in trouble. She was in so much trouble.

The day of the gala arrived with the ruthless efficiency of a Crownguard production. The house had been in preparation mode for days, but the final push transformed it into something that barely resembled a home and more closely resembled a venue. The ballroom on the ground floor, a room Lux had played in as a child and that was used perhaps three times a year, was opened and dressed in white and gold, every surface gleaming, every flower arrangement positioned with mathematical precision. Caterers had taken over the kitchen. A string quartet was setting up in the corner. Staff moved through the house with the coordinated urgency of a military operation, which was appropriate given that Augatha Crownguard commanded them with comparable authority.

Lux spent the morning being prepared.

This was the word for it. Not "getting ready," which implied agency and choice, but "being prepared," which accurately described the process of sitting in a chair while a professional makeup artist and a hairstylist worked on her with the focused intensity of artists preparing a canvas. Her mother had hired them, as she did every year, and they arrived early with cases of supplies and the calm competence of people who had done this many times for many wealthy families.

The result, as always, was flawless. Lux's hair was swept up in an elegant arrangement that managed to look effortless despite the forty-five minutes it had taken. Her makeup was warm and golden, enhancing rather than transforming, and her dress was a floor-length gown in a deep champagne gold that her mother had selected and that Lux had to admit was beautiful, even if the selection process had involved no input from her whatsoever.

She looked at herself in the mirror and saw what she always saw before these events: a very convincing portrait of the person her mother wanted her to be.

Then she went downstairs.

The gala didn't start for another hour, but the early arrivals would begin filtering in soon, and Augatha liked the family to be in position. Lux descended the main staircase, one hand on the banister, her heels clicking on the marble, and she was halfway down when she heard Garen's voice from the foyer below, loud and warm and directed at someone she couldn't yet see.

"You clean up well, Jinx! I barely recognized you."

"Thanks, big guy. I barely recognize myself. I think there's a whole team of people upstairs recovering from the effort."

Lux reached the bottom of the staircase and turned, and the world went very, very quiet.

Jinx was standing in the foyer.

She was wearing a dress. A white dress, floor-length, elegant and simple in the way that the most beautiful things often are, with a neckline that was modest enough for the occasion but open enough to reveal the clouds tattooed across her collarbone and down her chest, dark ink against fair skin, impossible to miss and making no attempt to hide. The dress fit her perfectly, which meant the stylists had done their work well, and it moved with her when she shifted her weight, the fabric catching the light with a subtle, pearlescent sheen.

Her hair was up. The wild blue of it, which Lux had only ever seen in braids or loose around her shoulders, had been gathered and arranged in an updo that was structured but not stiff, with a few deliberate tendrils escaping to frame her face. The blue against the white of the dress was striking, vivid and unapologetic, and the piercings in her ears had been complemented with small, delicate earrings that caught the light in points of silver.

Her makeup was done with a skill that highlighted the sharpness of her cheekbones and the arch of her brows and the impossible, luminous pale blue-grey of her eyes, which were wide and bright and looking around the foyer with an expression that mixed self-consciousness with determination.

She looked like she was a little out of place. She looked like she knew she was a little out of place and had decided to stand there anyway.

She looked absolutely, devastatingly, breathtakingly gorgeous.

Lux stood at the bottom of the staircase, one hand still on the banister, and the thought that went through her mind was clear and unbidden and arrived with the force of something that had been building for a very long time:

She looks like a bride.

And then, immediately after: Why did I just think about a wedding? Why is my brain constructing a scenario in which we are getting married? What is happening to me and when did it start and how do I make it continue?

That last part alarmed her.

Jinx turned and saw her. The self-consciousness in her expression shifted into something else when her eyes found Lux, something warm and open and slightly awed, and her crooked grin appeared, smaller and softer than usual, a private version of it.

"Hey, bright eyes," she spoke, and her voice was a little rougher than usual. "Wow, you look like actual sunlight."

"You look incredible," Lux couldn’t say anything else even if she tried, and her voice came out strange, thinner than she intended. She was too busy looking at Jinx to modulate her tone, too busy trying to reconcile the girl in dirty overalls and a welding mask with the woman standing in front of her in white, and the reconciliation was easy, that was the thing, because she was the same person, entirely and obviously the same person, and that was what made her beautiful. The professional styling and makeup and dress were all things that were just frames. The painting was the same one it had always been: sharp features and wide eyes and tattoo clouds and a grin like a dare.

"The dress is nice," Jinx commented, looking down at herself. "It's the fanciest thing I've ever worn. I keep being afraid I'm going to spill something on it and owe your family the equivalent of a small car."

"If you do, you won't owe anyone anything. You look perfect."

Jinx met her eyes, and for a moment neither of them said anything. The foyer was grand and bright around them, full of marble and light and the distant sounds of the caterers in the ballroom, and in the middle of all of it they stood, looking at each other, and the air between them was warm and charged with something that didn't have a name yet but was getting closer to one.

Garen, standing off to the side with a glass of something, looked at the two of them, looked at the ceiling, and took a very large sip of his drink.

The gala began.

Guests arrived in waves, admitted through the front entrance by staff and flowing into the ballroom in a river of expensive fabric and louder jewelry. The Crownguard gala was a fixture of the Demacian social calendar, attended by the wealthy and the influential and the politically connected, the kind of event where fortunes were discussed over champagne and alliances were formed over hors d'oeuvres. Lux knew many of the faces from previous years, the same families rotating through the same events in the same eternal cycle of aristocratic socializing.

She stayed close to Jinx. Partly because that was the plan, the social buffer strategy, and partly because Jinx's presence next to her made the whole event bearable in a way that nothing else ever had. They moved through the ballroom together, Lux introducing Jinx to the people it was necessary to acknowledge and steering her away from the people it was preferable to avoid, and Jinx handled each interaction with a grace that continued to surprise Lux, sharp and charming when she needed to be, funny without being inappropriate, and unfailingly, unapologetically herself.

The stares came, as Lux had known they would.

Jinx's tattoos were visible. The cloud designs that curled across her collarbone and chest, partially revealed by the neckline of the white dress, drew eyes the way a splash of paint on a clean wall does, involuntary and pointed. Her piercings caught the chandelier light and sent small sparks across the room. Her hair, even styled and elegant, was still vivid, electric blue in a sea of perhaps more "natural" colors, a signal flag of difference in a room that valued conformity above almost everything else.

The looks were not all unkind, but they were all noticing, and there was a judgment in the noticing that Lux felt like a hand pressing on her chest. She saw the way certain older women's eyes traveled from the tattoos to the piercings to the hair and then away, dismissive, categorizing Jinx in the way that people in this world categorized anyone who didn't fit the expected mold. She saw the way a cluster of men by the bar glanced at Jinx and then at each other with raised eyebrows and half-smiles that weren't quite jokes but weren't quite not.

Jinx saw them too. Lux could tell by the slight tightening of her expression, the way her posture shifted almost imperceptibly, squaring off, a subtle bracing against the weight of being looked at and found wanting.

"Ignore them," Lux gritted out, low, leaning close so only Jinx could hear.

"I'm not bothered."

"Oh really? Yet you're doing that thing with your shoulders."

Jinx glanced at her, surprised. "What thing?"

"They go up about half an inch and back about a quarter inch a lot. You do it when you're uncomfortable. I've seen you do it exactly twice before and both times you were about to make a joke to deflect."

Jinx stared at her for a moment. Then, incredibly, she laughed. "Paying close attention to me, huh?"

"Garen seems to think so."

"Yeah, well, Garen might have had a point. Just saying."

Lux opened her mouth to respond, but whatever she was going to say evaporated from her mind entirely, because at that moment, her gaze drifted past Jinx's shoulder toward the entrance of the ballroom, where the latest wave of guests was filtering in, and she saw two people who changed everything.

The first was Caitlyn Kiramman.

Lux knew Caitlyn by reputation and by the handful of social events where their families' circles had overlapped. House Kiramman was old money, like House Crownguard, connected and influential, deeply embedded in the same networks of wealth and power that defined Demacian and Piltovan high society. Caitlyn herself was tall and striking, dark-haired and sharp-featured, carrying herself with the composed authority of someone who had been raised in rooms like this one and knew exactly how to navigate them. She was wearing a deep navy gown that was tailored to perfection, and she moved through the entrance with the ease of someone who belonged here without question.

The second person walking beside Caitlyn, close enough that their arms occasionally brushed, was a woman Lux had never seen before.

She was shorter than Caitlyn’s height but broader in the shoulders, with a fighter's build visible even beneath the formal clothes she wore, a dark suit that fit well but that she seemed slightly uncomfortable in, tugging at the cuffs as she walked. Her hair was pink, cut and buzzed short and styled in a way that was tidy but not fussy. She had a strong jaw and sharp eyes and a presence that was physical and immediate, the kind of person you noticed when they walked into a room because the room seemed to rearrange itself around them. 

She also had tattoos. Visible ones, on her hands and forearms and creeping above the collar of her suit, mechanical and geometric designs that were different from Jinx's clouds but carried the same energy of deliberate, permanent self-expression.

And she had a face that looked like someone Lux knew.

The recognition didn't come from Lux. It came from beside her, in the form of a sound so small and so raw that it almost disappeared beneath the ambient noise of the gala.

Lux turned to Jinx.

Jinx had gone still. Completely, absolutely, undeniably still, in a way that Lux had never seen her before, because Jinx was never still, Jinx was constant motion and restless energy and hands that were always building or dismantling something, and now she was standing in the middle of the Crownguard ballroom in a white dress like a statue, and her face was a thing that Lux would never forget.

Every wall was gone. Every defense, every deflection, every joke and every mask and every layer of armor that Jinx wrapped around herself was simply absent, stripped away in a single instant, and what was left was just a person, raw and exposed and staring across a crowded room at someone she had lost a decade ago.

"Jinx?" Lux's voice was gentle, barely above a whisper. "Jinx, what is it?"

Jinx's lips moved. Her voice, when it came, was nothing like the voice Lux knew, nothing like the sharp, bouncing, confident cadence of the girl who left notes on the fridge. It was small and young and shaking, and it cracked on the single syllable like glass under pressure.

"Vi."

Lux looked back at the entrance. The woman with the pink hair and the tattoos was smiling at something Caitlyn had said, and the smile transformed her face into something warmer and younger, and in that warmth Lux could suddenly see it, could see the echo of a resemblance that was not in the specific features but in the architecture of them, the wide-set eyes and the sharpness and the way they held their bodies like they were ready for anything.

Caitlyn and her date were moving into the ballroom. They hadn't seen Jinx or Lux yet. They were heading toward a cluster of guests near the center of the room, and in moments they would be absorbed into the crowd and the chance would pass, the line of sight would close, and this impossible, accidental collision of past and present would dissolve into the noise of the gala.

Lux looked at Jinx. Jinx was still frozen, her eyes locked on the woman with pink hair, and the expression on her face was ten years of missing someone condensed into a single, shattering moment of recognition.

Lux took her hand instinctually. 

Jinx's fingers were cold. They closed around Lux's with a grip that was tight and desperate and not at all casual, the grip of someone holding onto the only solid thing in a world that had just tilted on its axis.

Across the ballroom, as if feeling the weight of a gaze she couldn't explain, the woman with the pink hair turned.

Her eyes found them.

The champagne glass in her hand hit the marble floor and shattered, and the sound was bright and sharp and final, a punctuation mark at the end of the longest sentence either of them had ever waited to finish.