Work Text:
“Men of genius are meteors,
intended to burn
to light their century.”
She had forgotten her voice. She had forgotten her sister's voice. Vi had only recently admitted that to herself. The thought had filled her with horror. She was already fifty-five years old.
More than thirty-one years had passed since the war in Piltover. And the daughter she and Caitlyn had adopted as an infant many years ago had turned nineteen this year. Exactly as old as Jinx had been when she died.
Vi often wondered what her sister would be like now. She would have been fifty. And whenever she thought about it, she would laugh softly. She could not imagine Jinx, no... Powder, she could not imagine Powder... old. Not at all. Vi's hair had long since gone gray, wrinkles had changed her face, and her muscles were no longer what they used to be.
But in her memory... her sister had remained forever young and vivid, exactly as Vi remembered her. She had been like a spark, like the flare of a match that lit up two cities, changed their history, and quickly burned out.
No. Vi could not imagine her old.
One night, many years ago, she realized that after she had abandoned her on that fateful night, she had spent less than a week with her sister in total before death took her away. She still remembered how badly her heart had hurt when that realization came. How long she had cried in the dead silence of that night.
Powder came to her in dreams, more than once. In some of them, she comforted Vi, telling her she had found peace. In others, she said she had been returned to her, but only for a little while, only to say goodbye.
Her most hated nightmare was different. In it, she would wake to the sound of knocking at the door. She would open it, and Jinx would be standing on the threshold.
“What are you doing here?” Vi would ask.
“Oh, I just decided to stop by,” Jinx would answer.
“But you’re dead.”
“Ha! Sis, did you really believe that? You know me. You won’t get rid of me that easily.”
“You won’t leave me again, will you?”
“Of course not, sis. I’ll always be with you,” she would say.
And then Vi would wake up.
Vi hated dreams like that. More than anything in the world, she hated waking up and realizing that it had only been a dream - that her sister had been gone for a very long time, and that Vi would never see her again or hear her voice again. In the dream, she always believed that Jinx had faked her death. But when she woke up, she understood that she physically could not have done it: Vander, who had become a monster, had been gripping her waist too tightly, and the Hexgates towered sixty stories high.
On top of that, Vi knew Jinx would never have done something like that to her. She would never have made her sister grieve so deeply. She was not like that. She would have left a note, or come back to her after some time. But it had been more than thirty years now since that war.
"Always with you, sis." Vi would remember those words and comfort herself with the thought that her little sister was watching over her.
What a forgotten luxury it was - to say "sister" and hear an answer. And yet... what had her voice sounded like?
Vi was no longer the impulsive teenager she had once been, and she had long since stopped solving every problem with her fists. She had grown older and wiser, and only with age did she truly come to understand her sister, whom she had failed to understand when she was young and inexperienced.
That was why she no longer called her Jinx, not even in her thoughts. She had come to understand that it was a brand her sister had never wanted to bear, but had felt condemned to carry as the price of that fatal mistake in childhood.
In her memory, all their quarrels had long since faded, and only warm memories remained.
With time, she began to believe in fate. And she hated it for placing so much on her sister's fragile shoulders. Once, Sevika admitted to her that if not for Jinx, no one would have followed her and Ekko to fight the Noxian army for Piltover. Ekko had been gone for nearly a year and had known nothing of the wartime situation in Zaun, and Sevika did not have that kind of power or legitimacy. Jinx was the only one the people were willing to follow to certain death against the Noxian army, especially in order to help their oppressors. That year, she was more popular than anyone who had come before her and anyone who would come after her.
Vi had rethought her sister's life and realized that, by a cruel irony of fate, everything she had done against Piltover had ultimately led to people rallying around her, and she had led them to Piltover's aid at its darkest hour. That was simply how it all came together, even though her sister had clearly never been striving for that. And yet it was only because of that that Sevika got a seat on the council, even though Powder never lived to see it.
Vi believed peace between the cities was her sister's achievement. And her own happy future too. Maybe she believed it out of grief, out of a need to cleanse her sister’s memory in her own eyes? She did not know.
Powder had made her stay with Caitlyn, had saved her life three times, sacrificed herself, and given them a peaceful future without war. Her sister had been a genius who had changed the course of history all by herself. Jinx became the most powerful catalyst of a historical turning point, despite some of the terrible things she had done.
Yet deep down, Vi believed that by the end of her life, her little sister had changed, and that if war had not taken her away, she might have used her intelligence to help build a better future.
But all of it was merely speculation, for Jinx was dead — and had been dead for more than thirty years.
And yet Vi hated thinking that her happiness and peace had been paid for with the fact that her sister no longer breathed.
Her fault. If only she had listened to her back then and stepped off that stupid ledge thirty years ago.
Though there had still been much work ahead, thirty years later Zaun had become exactly what Ekko had seen in his journey to an alternate universe. Yes, on the fourth anniversary of Jinx's death, he had told her everything.
About the happy Powder in that universe, about their family still being alive there, and about the fact that Vi herself was dead in that reality. That it was precisely because of her death there that peace had come.
And she had felt a bitter mockery of fate in that, as if they were never meant to be together in any universe. As if, by the cruel laws of existence, peace between the cities was only possible through the blood of one of them.
And Vi hated that.
She would never hear the word "sis" again. What would it have sounded like in her sister's voice?
She would never again be able to share that memory with anyone - the memory of what their mother smelled like.
When Jinx died, her childhood died with her.
She had grown up too early, forced to take responsibility for her siblings. And Jinx, because of her trauma, had remained trapped in childhood. But... In the end, Vi had managed to live the calm adult life that Jinx had never lived long enough to reach.
Over those thirty-one years since her younger sister's death, much had faded from her memory. But she was endlessly grateful that the people of Zaun had preserved her image in murals on the walls.
She was standing in front of one such mural now. In a green alley flooded with sunlight, in Zaun, on a perfectly ordinary summer day in the year 1022.
She had come down to the lower city on business, but as she passed by, she could not help stopping to look. She always stopped.
It was a mural in the very center of the city, but not a painted one. No. It had been made out of tiny stones of different colors and sizes. With the utmost care and love.
This mural would not fade or be washed away by rain. It would preserve the image of her younger sister for ages.
"I wonder what Powder would say about this?" she thought. What would her sister’s voice sound like now?
But suddenly, someone behind her spoke, pulling her from the thought.
"We know what all of you think about this. But we won't let you take it down."
A man in his forties was standing behind her. Only then did she realize he was talking to her because she was wearing an enforcer's uniform.
"You mean the mural?"
"Yes. I know what the topsiders think, but Jinx is a hero to us. And we want to preserve her memory."
"Powder."
"I don't understand."
"Her real name was Powder. And she's my hero too."
"What?" He looked shocked.
"She was my younger sister. She was..."
Was she still a sister, if all her siblings were dead?
The man stepped closer, astonishment in his eyes, staring at her as if she were some mythical creature.
"Then why did everyone call her Jinx?" he suddenly asked, though quite calmly.
"Because I was the one who named her that. Though... I was the one who named her Powder, too," Vi said hoarsely, remembering the first time she had met her sister half a century ago.
***
"Vi, come here, meet your sister," Felicia called her over, and little five-year-old Vi happily ran up and reached for the bundle holding her baby sister. "Careful, she's still so tiny."
Her little sister looked at her with wide gray eyes full of curiosity and delight, and in those eyes there was endless love. Vi did not know why, but she could feel that love.
And Vi understood that she would do anything to protect her. She looked at her little sister, at her chubby cheeks, her upturned nose, and her gray eyes, and fell in love at first sight.
Connol, her father, stood nearby and smiled as he watched.
"We decided to name her..."
"Powder!" Vi cut her mother off. "I want her to be called Powder!"
"But..."
"Powder. That’s it!" Vi stuck out her tongue at her parents, and Connol and Felicia burst out laughing at the sight.
"All right, now give your sister here." Connol reached out to take the baby back, but Vi would not let him.
"No! Mine, mine. My Powder." Clutching her sister tightly, Vi started backing away, and then she began running across the room on her little legs while her father tried to carefully take the baby back and Felicia watched, laughing fondly.
***
Vi remembered it, and a single tear rolled down her cheek. Wherever her sister had ended up, Vi wanted only one thing: for her to have found peace.
"Do you miss?"
"Every day. The hole in my heart has grown smaller, but it never disappears. Still..." She lowered her eyes to the hand where Jinx's last words had been written: "Always with you, sis." She had gotten that tattoo on the anniversary of her death, decade later. That phrase had been a bright ray in her darkest times and a dark stain in her brightest ones. It wounded like the sharpest knife and healed more deeply than any medicine. "She’s still with me, even if she’s in another world now."
Vi walked on, returning to her errands, while the mural remained where it was. For Zaun, Jinx was frozen there for the ages - a legend who had changed the course of history. The girl who had given the undercity a voice.
But to Vi, she remained simply Powder. Her little sister. The sister whose voice she had forgotten.