Soaked and shivered from the rain
You have always been a delicate disaster
Fine in fire and of frame
Me and you are overdue for fiendish laughter
~ "Villainous Thing" - Shayfer James
Full disclosure: Silco never wanted to be a father.
Why would he? Fatherhood was a grenade lobbed into the palms. It left men carbonized skeletons of their selves. The fast-footed fled the explosion's radius. The foolish let a hole burn in slow-motion through their insides.
Like Vander.
Silco saw no nobility in his brother's martyrdom. It was a commonplace mess. Anyone could be a father. Hell, ask half the layabouts in the Undercity. All it took was a cockstand squirting into a cunt. Outcome? A brat. He'd never been their biggest fan. Squalling, shitting, life-sucking creatures. They stole one's capacity to dream. Men become rooted; their roots rotted.
Silco never wanted to be a father.
He'd wanted a protégé. Preferably a boy. Aged eighteen to twenty-one, when the thirst for self-sufficiency went hand-in-hand with a total absence of self-preservation.
To Silco, it was pure pragmatism. The blank slate of a boy's mind was best suited to inscribe his life-lessons upon. The hard buffer of a boy's body was best built to absorb the brutality Silco routinely meted out. The Undercity seethed with their type. Boys with sinewy muscle and sharp eyes, and when he'd find them, he'd lure than into his den. Fuck with their heads; fuck them into the mattress. And it was good, but never quite good enough.
None of the boys had the right spark.
There were promising ones. But their brains were the wrong size; their spines the wrong substance. Too much of the time, Silco felt himself alone, even when sharing the same space as them. A passionate pedagogue needed a promising pupil. What did he get? Gutless pretenders. By the time he'd finished with Deckard—another disappointment—Silco was ready to throw down the gauntlet, and watch the contenders literally throw down.
Survival of the fittest; a toss of the coin. The winner, he'd take under his wing.
That night, Sevika had practically pummeled down his door. Newly-broken from Vander and her own stubborn convictions, she'd pledged herself to Silco's bloodier cause. On the streets, she'd enforce his will. Behind closed doors, she'd abide by it.
Whatever it took—for a future without Piltover.
Silco wouldn't deny he was half-tempted. Sevika was far from ideal. But she had a sizable influence over the Lanes. As a worker, she was diligent, brutal, and fiercely loyal. A kingpin-on-the-make could do worse. It was not enough to have a vicious crew. He needed a second-in-command. A XO. Someone who could be trusted with the mission's nuts and bolts—all without flattering or fucking him over.
Sevika fit the bill. She had a steady head for strategy, and was always privy to what went on behind the scenes. Her counsel was ruthlessly pragmatic and she was always striving to be indispensable to the cause—and by proxy to Silco. They already shared a history; he'd known her sister. Her loss was once tied—intimately—to his own.
The eve of Vander's murder, they'd struck a handshake deal.
Then Silco found Jinx.
From the start, she fit. In his life, in his plans. Most shockingly? In his arms.
The closeness had nearly blown apart his brainpan. Disarmed him inside-out, so he was suddenly stripped of his subversive's trappings, left nakedly human and humbled. Imagine a tear-streaked comet crashing into your life. An embryo robed in flames. That was Jinx in a nutshell. The presence of her ate away at everything around Silco. It ate away something inside him, an emptiness that for years had festered.
Jinx made a home inside that emptiness, and in doing so unlocked within him a newness of possibility.
He still remembers their charmed embrace in the hellish cloaca outside the factory. The shape of Jinx, tiny and tense and shivering, and his whispers of It's okay, even as his eyes passed over Vander's remains with a sick internal collapse, a fathomless void behind his ribs replaced by a child's nearly-inaudible crying.
(Is that fatherhood?)
The question would echo throughout his and Jinx's history.
They assigned each other no labels. From the start, she called him Silco; he called her Child. She was just a child. No different from the hundreds of dirty sumpsnipes who looked like her, spoke like her, dressed like her. Yet to Silco, they didn't even occupy the same stratosphere as Jinx. He'd never met anyone remotely like her, except himself.
Like him, she'd endured betrayal and abandonment. Like him, she'd bubbled with a hot cauldron of hatred against her oppressors. Like him, she'd dared to do something about it.
Taking her in was almost a morbid joke among his crew. Smallest stray the Boss's found yet.
It was true; strays had always gravitated to Silco. He didn't collect them as a moral calling. That was Vander's pick of poison. His own were a different breed. For one, they were killers. Most had been disemboweled by the machinery of society. Most had learnt to crouch in the blind spots and dish out disembowelment in kind. Most had rage issues, or drug issues, or daddy issues, or a cocktail of all three.
He'd found Dustin after he nearly stabbed Silco under a deserted bridge for five bronze washers, his skin dotted bloody with needle tracks. Silco's counter-offer was five gold hexes and lessons on knifework. He'd found Ran lying piss-soaked in a landfill after royally pissing off a drug cartel. Silco had promised them three square meals if they'd work as his runner to take the cartel down. He'd found Lock in a barehanded cage-fight where ex-cons disfigured each other for cash. After the match, Silco had approached him with an icepack for his torn-apart face and an offer to be his bodyguard—given he'd just pummeled the old one's face in.
He'd always had a knack for sizing up the right people. He knew how to tap into the vein of their needs, to use them for his own ends. It was the Undercity's paradox. Hopelessness ran rampant. Yet nihilism was an aberration. Most people had secret dreams. They were the nuts and bolts of their natures; the fuel that kept them moving.
Silco made himself the gateway to those dreams. In world of disenchantment, he wielded hope with a spellbinding eloquence of self-belief. Wherever he went, others followed.
Jinx was different.
She didn't follow Silco for plunder and profit. She followed him as a child follows an adult: with a natural needfulness. He remembers when he'd brought her back to his old flat—a sunless walk-up burrowed into Oshra Va'Zaun's ancient tunnels. The chamber was a hundred and thirty square feet in size, with a wash-closet that contained only a toilet, and a kitchen that held the only sink, and a tub shut off by a pair of chipped glass doors that never latched properly. No bed—just a salvaged sofa, and a futon.
Jinx—Powder then—had eyed the surroundings with misgiving. Technically, she belonged to him, too. So did the Last Drop; under renovation as Silco's new headquarters. He'd pocketed her birth certificate alongside Vander's deed.
There was nowhere else for her to go.
(Is that fatherhood?)
He reassured her the gloomy quarters were temporary. Soon, they'd move to the Drop. His headquarters now—and transformed from Vander's haphazard clutter into a sleek showpiece of modernity.
"My room… our room," Jinx faltered. "Vi's and Mylo's and Claggor's…"
"It's still there."
"Still…?"
"Should I have it torn down?"
Her face went bone-white. "No!"
"Then it will stay. So will your belongings."
He patted her cheek to soothe color back into it. Jinx flinched as if he'd swung to slap her.
She'd been that way throughout their early days. Skittish as an eel. Silco did his best not to crowd her. Spoke to her softly. Touched her sparingly—or not at all. He'd let her take his futon, and caught his own shuteye on the sagging sofa. Each night, he'd struggled to ignore his twinging muscles—and the sound of the girl's crying.
Most sumpsnipes cried themselves to sleep. Their reasons ran the gamut from hunger to abuse. The smarter ones did so in silence. She'd learn the same, before toughening up enough to stop entirely.
She didn't.
Nightly, sobs squeezed out of her small body. Daily, a miscellany of mishaps followed her everywhere.
She had a food thing. Hoarding, overeating, starving. She had a hygiene thing. Days without baths, until she'd developed a moist, murky aroma that called to mind a mushroom sprouting in the basement. She had a touch thing. Clinging to Silco's leg like a leech when he'd go anywhere, but biting off anyone else's fingers if they'd come near her.
She had a sanity thing. Prone to numb, spaced-out silences punctuated by bursts of inarticulate, mouth-frothing hysteria.
Cracked in the head.
Nobody in his crew dared say it. Yet Silco read their expressions plainly. They bet folding money he'd gut her soon. Silco was a patient man. Depthlessly patient. But his tolerance for troublemakers ran in reverse. In the past, he'd never hesitated to cut a liability loose—literally, figuratively.
He didn't.
Instead he established routines for Jinx. Nocturnal, like his own, but smooth as clockwork. Meals served on the dot. Bedtime rituals of pajama donning and toothbrushing. Morning rituals of bathtime and breakfasting. He got her an airtight box to store shelf-stable food (cookies, crackers, jams) so she could snack whenever she'd felt peckish. He designated a corner of his walk-up as Your Spot—a safe space for her belongings.
It wasn't consideration for her damaged mind, so much as damage-control.
The saying goes: Like knows like. From the first, Silco had seen the comet-flash of monstrosity in the girl's eyes, a kissing-kin to his own. Her bomb had taken out his entire Shimmer supply—mortally wounding everyone in its radius. Half of Singed's body was broiled meat. Sevika's arm was a lost cause. The rest of her was still in critical condition.
To let Jinx loose would be an error. Fatal—if she chose payback.
Better to keep her at his side. One less casualty of the Undercity's underbelly; one more soldier in their war against Piltover. Not an act of charity, but of justice. She deserved her due against Topside as much as the rest of them.
Sprawled on the sofa, Silco savored the prospect. It was his and Jinx's final night in the walk-up. Tomorrow, they'd relocate to the Drop.
A new phase in Zaun's history would begin.
In dreams, the Pilt's bilgewater engulfed him. Vander's hairy-knuckled hands squeezed the air from his lungs. Silco slashed through the chokehold with his razor, a sob throttling his chest. When his good eye snapped open, he was folded into a self-protective knot on the couch. His fingers were likewise knotted around the bone-handled knife he'd taken off Vander.
A softer blade-edge from the lantern limned the child in his futon. The sobbing was coming from her, not him.
Same as every night.
Yet this night, Silco couldn't ease his muscles back into indifference. Instinctively, he slipped off the sofa, and went to her. She was curled into a trembling ball, her back to him. But when Silco knelt to touch the nape of her neck, she froze. Fear cooked off her bones, hot as the fireblast that'd wiped out his factory.
Did she expect—finally—her own denouement?
Worse?
Silco's cold hand stayed between her shoulderblades. By degrees, the comfort registered on her. Her quakes eased. Instinctually, she rolled toward him. The turn of her body turned Silco's in kind, like a set of sharp teeth fitting together. He slid into the futon. She slid into his arms. Her tearstained face burrowed between his ribcage.
Together, they slept.
The night had set a precedent. At the Drop, she'd have her own room. During bad nights, she'd sleep in Silco's. As the years passed and she grew taller, she'd replicate the embrace across higher spots on his torso. Silco would wake to her small blue skull nestled in the center of his chest, the crook of his arm, the ball of his shoulder. Fully grown, she'd sleep on the same pillow, their heads templed together like mismatched twins.
Privacy was nonexistent in the Undercity. Since childhood, Silco had shared his sleeping-pallet. First with his family in the tenements, everyone spread shoulder-to-shoulder across the rotted floorboards. Later in the orphanage, boys housed two-by-two like peas in a dirty pod. Then in the mines, Silco's bedroll tucked close to Vander's, their whispers traded back and forth in the dark between drags of the same cigarette.
In such close quarters, innocence could easily devolve into the opposite. Yet Jinx slept blissfully unmolested. Literally, figuratively.
For the first time in years—so did Silco.
Stay that close to someone and you enter a pact. Your molecules begin dancing together in a transference of trust. Sometimes he'd feel it: a primal metamorphosis. Two monsters sharing their first taste of safety.
Sharing the same dreams.
(Is that fatherhood?)
Their nights were smooth sailing. Their days? A rollercoaster. Jinx was unlike any child he'd been around—and he'd been around plenty. He wasn't a damn Piltie: dandling a well-behaved tot on his knee for five minutes before the nursemaid whisked it off to bed. Labor was shared in the Lanes; childrearing was no exception. Silco always had a knack. Charmingly changeable with his peers, cuttingly cruel with his underlings, he was something else with children. Sitting cross-legged to play at their level, while reminding them with his unnervingly two-faced façade that he was something other: a storybook trickster beckoning them on a grand adventure.
Children, deep down, were no different than adults. Most were happiest when proving their usefulness. In turn, Silco's praise demonstrated his authority over them.
Jinx was different.
She didn't care about being useful. She needed to be extraordinary. Most of all, she needed him—and the entire Undercity—to acknowledge it with the maximum of fuss.
His crew thought she was crazy. Not the regular shithouse-rat crazy. The kind of crazy that left nations as scorch-marks on history's map. From Silco, they'd taken their cue and been nice at first. Crooning to her like a rabid dog under a shotgun barrel. Poor kid. Sucks having nobody but Mr. S for company.
Mostly, Jinx would bite them. Other times, she'd flash a nasty little smile.
"Aw, it don't bother me," she'd say in a faux-cutesy drawl. "Mister S is the nicest of you ugly bunch."
By the month's end, two facts were self-evident.
One: Jinx was as clever as she was certifiably batshit.
Two: she was an insufferable brat.
Silco grew accustomed to Sevika recounting a litany of her crimes. Each one was prefaced the same way: "That little bitch—!"
Some stunts were harmless. A thumbtack in someone's boot; a thumb in someone's eyeball. Others were downright dangerous. She'd taken a five-pound mallet to Dustin's kneecap after he'd given her a wet-willy. She'd dumped battery acid into Ran's boot after they'd swapped her soda-pop with vodka. She'd tossed a lit firecracker into Lock's face after he'd dangled her upside-down from the window.
Silco's response was a shrug. "Next time, pick easier prey."
He'd seldom punished Jinx. She'd already been punished plenty. It's what stoked her into such random acts of savagery. A lifelong accretion of rage—born from her own smallness and the casual taunts it invited—came together in a wrathful supernova.
Small fry, big attitude.
Since boyhood, that was Silco's own state of being. It had invited a violent freakshow of tormentors and his own calculatedly twisted reprisals. Take a beating lying down, and you forfeit your right to stand tall again. They'd hunted him in packs; he'd struck back on his own terms by isolating them and turning their own tactics against them.
"If they're strong, they can hurt you," he'd told Jinx. "But if you're smart, you can hurt them worse."
Jinx was exponentially more than smart. She was a damn prodigy. It wasn't simply how she'd recite the Periodic Table like a nursery rhyme, or her ease at rearranging mechanical patterns like toy blocks. It was the wicked zest that powered her efforts.
For Jinx, gadgetry wasn't a hobby. It was a lifelong calling.
One time, she'd found a garbage bag full of junk by a demolition site. Spark plugs, spanners, screws. Silco had raised an eyebrow. "Two questions, child: why are you collecting rubbish, and who saw you sneaking off?"
Her answer: "It's not rubbish!" and "Nobody!"
Silco let her keep the booty. A reward for outfoxing his lookouts. The lookouts? Gutted by sundown.
Meanwhile, Jinx sat crosslegged in a corner. With the modest components, she designed a projectile that shattered through the tensile surface of glass—before itself shattering into flame-belching shards. She doodled it with pink polka-dots and dubbed it Buttons.
Her first gift to Silco. Crude, but delightfully creative.
Silco was accustomed to gifts—backhanders, bodies, blowjobs. Some had worth; others were empty tokens. Yet he felt a strange shock-wave of pride at Jinx's gift. It was the first he'd received from heartfelt impulse rather than heartless strategy.
(Is that fatherhood?)
A month afterward, the Slickjaws ambushed the Drop. Buttons incinerated them to cinders.
At a cost.
The explosion jellied the entire basement. Fiery spume gusted through the ventilation ducts. Glass sparkled in the air as the windows blew outward. Most of the crew scrambled down the eaves and gutters. The unluckier fell and cracked their necks. The sparking debris nearly set Sevika's newly-minted arm on fire.
"That little bitch—!"
Later, Sevika fumed that Silco should cut off Jinx's finger as a lesson. He'd refused. The Slickjaws had gotten their payback. Writ in their blood more than his own.
Next time, they'd think twice before crossing him.
Jinx didn't see it that way. First time Silco noticed the split inside her. One half huddled beside him on the couch of their safehouse, wrapped in a blanket and sipping cocoa with a dollop of whipped cream. The other half suspended in a burning halo of blueness from the old factory blast that pulverized her family.
Her dull eyes traced the purpling bruise under Silco's good eye. They'd both been roughed up by Slickjaws before the explosion. Since his empire's expansion, Silco was growing less accustomed to sneak attacks. But nothing is foolproof, and the price of violence is violence. He awoke each day prepared to pay it in full.
Yet when the Slickjaws had edged him into the basement, Silco had found himself easing in front of Jinx. She'd jittered on the brink of hysteria, her gasps filling the air with sharp unsteady sounds. A chem-punk had lost his patience. He'd hauled Jinx out from behind Silco with a brutal wrench—then slapped her hard enough to send her crashing to the floor.
Something inside of Silco likewise snapped. Suddenly his knife was in his hand and his body was in motion, unpremeditated, nearly feral. Three men against one, and each of them bigger than he was. They must have thought it'd be easy as pie, a simple beat-down.
Silco had already clicked into killing mode.
A single well-placed stab to a femoral artery deliquesces the strongest man. Except Silco didn't stab once. His knife flashed over and over until three bodies wrapped themselves around his ankles and a Mount Vesuvius of blood cascaded over him. Not a bad look to wear. Beats a death shroud.
A second wave of attackers burst into the basement. Guns locked and loaded.
Shrieking, Jinx pulled the pin on Buttons—and flung.
The explosion's blowback had knocked her and Silco against the door. The Slickjaws were doused in a bath of flames. Their screams were choked off mid-breath. Smoking plugs of muscle and bones leapt through the air.
Miraculously, Jinx and Silco crawled out unscathed.
Now Jinx whispered, "I'm sorry."
"For what?"
"I always do this. I always jinx things."
Silco stared down at her. In that moment, he was struck by how profoundly vulnerable she looked: oozing agony like a torn-open vein. Not a fighter, his Jinx. Worse, she was aware of it, a failure that inwardly festered. Except defensive mechanisms that weren't natural could be nurtured. Silco had done it. Weaponized his wits and razored his rage to a killing edge.
Jinx could too.
Gently, he clasped her hand in his own. By nature, he wasn't given to displays of affection. Yet there was a dizzying dip in his chest when Jinx nestled closer. Her small fingers twined with his. Knuckles wedging together like teeth.
He said, "I'm glad you jinxed things tonight."
"You're glad?"
"Your bomb worked. Spilled blood, but saved us." He squeezed her hand. "If you're a jinx, you're a damned good one."
Dubious, she scrunched up her nose. "There's no such thing as a good jinx."
"Yet here you are. Giving as good as you get."
She gave him a strange smile. Not her usual impish twist. This was sweeter, and yet darkly melancholy with it.
"Then that's what I'll be."
"Hm?"
She burrowed closer. Sparklers of comets-tails in her eyes.
"I'll be Jinx. The best—worst—Jinx they've ever seen."
That had set a precedent, too.
Crowned with her epithet like a tangle of thorns, Jinx embarked on a bloody-minded quest to embody its meaning. The best and the worst.
Silco encouraged her. The girl was a raw spark of catastrophe. Every minute it was left by the wayside was time wasted. This meant nonstop training. Incendiaries weren't Silco's forte. But his secret network ran like a spider's web through the Undercity. In its sticky tangles, the most unsavory talent was at his mercy.
He'd taken Jinx to the greasepits and gunrooms. He'd introduced her to his mechanics and mercenaries; to his pickpockets and polymaths. For six hours a day, seven days a week, they'd cultivated her skills in artillery, battle maneuvers, stealth tactics. The performers at his clubs taught her acrobatic feats worthy of a full-blooded feline; the conmen at his casinos taught her how to gull a target with a glance; the doxies at his brothels taught her how to disarm a troublemaker with a well-timed blow.
In Piltover, a child's innocence was prized. In the Undercity, it was a liability. Jinx came to him a gunshy girl at the world's mercy. Silco was determined to shape her into a woman who feared nothing and no-one. Silvering, they both humerously called it. He spoke to her of rawness and refinement—a state achieved by fine-tuning instinct and cultivating inner-discipline.
"You're a natural," he told her. "But reaching the pinnacle takes practice."
Jinx proved an apt pupil.
She was already a crackshot with firearms. Soon, she grew into a bloody crackerjack at everything else. Her screw-ups with bombs became more sporadic. She began syncing her schedule with Silco's. While he'd stand knee-deep in strategy inside his office, maps spread everywhere to trace his expanding empire, she'd skulk unseen in the rafters, crafting the tools for his success. She'd scan Piltover's tech periodicals for designs; she'd pop up at his shoulder with requests for special components.
Each time, she'd brace herself for refusal. Silco never gave it.
"If you need it, I'll get it.'
His mantra for everything: food, clothes, tools. He'd twigged early that No was a word Jinx was accustomed to hearing. It overlapped the lung-splintering limitations of Silco's own childhood. Not enough warmth. Not enough rest. Not enough meals. They were both born on the wrong side of the river, where daily necessities were a crapshoot. Most subsisted on next-to-nothing.
Silco vowed that Jinx would have better.
For her part, Jinx was at first wary of his generosity. He could tell that no adult had paid her such steady attention. Not even Vander. Yet, as Silco invested increasing time and wealth into her projects—into her—it sunk into Jinx that she could count on him.
Soon, she grew into her improved circumstances like a sharp little fang piercing through a bed of gums. By twelve, she'd shot up like a weed. Put on a few pounds, and packed on much-needed muscle. Her surliness fizzled out into wisecracks and a delightfully devious gleam in her eyes. She longer smelled of unwashed despair, but of gun oil and the candied cherry shampoo that Silco bought for her hair.
She'd worn it before in a tangled braid with haphazard clips. Now, it hung to her waist in a safety hazard of blue. Sevika had squabbles with her that veered into outright violence, because the older woman kept trying to lop it off before it got her killed during a firefight.
Silco left them to it. He'd bigger concerns than little girls' hairdos. But the final standoff ended with Sevika wrestling Jinx to the ground and yanking her hair until her screams provoked Silco's intervention.
Afterward, he asked, "When, child, will you bob your hair and be done?"
Jinx shook her head. "Nuh-uh."
"Why not?"
Jinx jutted her bottom lip and refused to answer.
The stubbornness was mystifying. Personally, Silco preferred an immaculately tidy look. He was always happiest at his barber's. The scents of bay rum shaving cream; the richness of lather; the fluffiness of the towels. Salons were a good place to unwind over a casual confab. Jinks the Barber was an Undercity phrase for informants—largely because they were such good gossips. They had the latest scoop on who'd gotten in trouble, and who needed rescuing. Each person a potential recruit for Silco's cause.
Good barbers are valuable assets. Tip them generously.
Once, he'd coaxed Jinx to accompany him to a cozy two-chair salon at Entresol. Just before closing time; nobody in the room but the stylist. Cooing, she impulsively ran her fingers through Jinx's hair to admire its luster. Jinx exploded into screams on the spot. Somehow, she'd gotten her hands on a set of clippers. The chrome mirrors and candy-striped walls were sprayed with red. It took five of Silco's men to run damage control: two to drag Jinx off the stylist, one to haul the woman to a clinic, and another to mop up the blood.
Afterward, Silco smoked a cigarette in the dark slush of the alleyway. Jinx clung to his side, bloodsplattered and bubbling over with sobs.
Sevika, taking in the macabre tableau, broke into her usual refrain: "That little bitch—!"
Silco met her fierce eyes with his coldest look. "Drop it."
"Is this gonna happen whenever she's in public?!"
"Last time, Sevika."
Sevika's dark eyes passed from Silco's implacable stare to his steadying arm around Jinx's shoulders. Something shifted beneath her scowl. An eyeblink's understanding. Grumbling, she stormed off.
Jinx burrowed into Silco's flank. "Ogre."
"She's not so bad."
"Just ugly."
"If she's ugly, my company ought to knock you dead."
Jinx's smile was an abbreviated tremor. Then it faded. "I'm sorry."
Kneeling, Silco shrugged off his coat and folded it around her. "Never mind sorry. Tell me something."
"'Bout what?"
"This hair nonsense. And I want the truth."
She nodded falteringly.
"Who took care of it before?"
When she'd been Vander's, he meant. He tried to picture Vander fixing Jinx's hair. Vander, who'd bent pickaxes like putty between his oversized hands. Vander, who'd had a grip like a vice. Thick fingers ridged with callouses; knuckles like sailor's knots. Some nights, Silco still felt them encircling his neck.
He couldn't imagine anything but violence leaping from Vander's hands. The same violence that now leapt from his own.
Softly, Jinx said, "Vi."
"Your sister?"
A shaky nod. "She promised me—"
"What?"
Jinx's eyes went shiny with unshed tears. "She promised to take care of me. Always. Family sticks together. Her mouth crumpled at the edges—grief boiling into rage. She lied. We were never family. Why else would she leave?"
Silco felt the constriction of phantom hands on his throat. But the rise and fall of his chest meant he was still breathing. Gathering the lapels of his coat more closely around her, he leaned in so that their foreheads touched. His tone held a quietness adjacent to gentleness.
"Your sister's gone."
"I-I know…"
"But that doesn't mean you've no family."
Jinx's face was wet-streaked. "There's nobody left."
"There's me."
Her breath hitched. She'd stared at him as if sucker-punched. "You?"
"Unless I'm too ugly?"
She shook her head, tears dripping off her glistening chin.
"Then it's settled." Pretend-solemn, Silco stuck out his little finger. "Let's have no more tiffs over your hair."
"I d-don't want to cut it."
"Then we'll do something else."
"Like what?"
"Whatever keeps you from wrestling with it." A beat. "Or with the Ogre."
His sly mockery washed away Jinx's doubts. Her sob teetered into a giggle. Twining her tiny finger with his, she squeezed.
The softest touch. Yet it tugged on Silco's wasted heartstrings.
(Is that fatherhood?)
The first time Silco had braided Jinx's hair, he'd felt a tremor in his hands. Hands he'd always been so vain about. Their elegance belied their talent as instruments of fine-tuned torture. The sharply-fluent script that flowed from them had stoked the embers of resentment into a revolution. His blue-collar roots had toughened them for blunt-force tasks of both bricklaying and bone-cracking. Later, he'd honed them for wielding edged weapons: making blades move like spinnerets between his fingers.
This was different.
On the mundane task of hair-brushing, his hands felt inept and uncoordinated. Sitting on the bed with Jinx's back to him, he smoothed the brush in rhythmic strokes through her hair. In his arms, Jinx was a ball of restless energy: kicking her heels over the bed's edge, crooning off-key songs with the oldies on the phonograph, making sulky complaints when he'd accidentally tug at her tangles.
In the mirror, Silco stared at them together: a tableau vivant of mismatched polarities. The pale smallness of Jinx in everlasting motion, like licks of white-hot flame. His own body dark and languid by contrast, all jagged lines like a deapsea monster.
Yet the rhythm of Jinx's exhalations synced perfectly with his own. His hands gathered smoothness as they wove her hair into braids. Likewise, the braids wove their magic through Jinx, wreathing her in a dreamlike spell. By the time Silco finished, she was nearly asleep.
"All done."
Jinx's eyes flipped open. In the mirror, he saw her entire face animated with glee. He'd styled her hair into braids like a pair of scorpion's stings. Jinx liked it so much that she showed it off to everyone at the Drop. Soon, she'd routinely submitted to stillness if Silco could replicate the look. In time, she'd do it herself, in different styles—though none departed very far from his original.
Silco's dresser was once a well-arranged bareness. A comb, a smoking case, a bottle of pomade, and a vial of Shimmer punctuated by its mechanized injector. Eventually it became a girlish vitrine populated by sparkling barrettes, clips of variegated neon, miniscule combs, pigmy pots of liquids and glossy pencils to accentuate the dark lines already etched permanently under Jinx's eyes.
Balefully, he eyed the clutter each morning. "You've got your own tallboy, Jinx."
Jinx shrugged, "Meh. Yours is nicer."
There's a saying the Undercity: Even the Gray doesn't steal air like a child.
Silco had once believed it. He'd left those cares to the hoi polloi. Commitment, likewise. Even in his sole serious relationship, he'd maintained a measure of distance. Once, he'd overheard Nandi say to her sister, Sil's very thoughtful. She hadn't meant that Silco was kind—ha!—more that his attention was always occupied elsewhere.
Zaun.
Silco had never put his freedom on the line for anything else. Not marriage, not children. Why trade the uncertainty of progeny for the certainty of a legacy?
Zaun was his legacy.
Yet, day by day, Jinx crept into its center. Looking back, Silco was unable to trace the phenomenon as a linear trajectory. Jinx's proximity was like Jinx herself: a randomness of magic and mania. She left bits of herself everywhere. The ashtray on his desk was adorned with her doodles. His calling card, the Eye of Zaun, was her brainchild. The mug he sipped from was designed with her monkey motif. In his coat, he carried two handkerchiefs, one a fine-pressed black cambric (for him), the other prettified by colorful needlework (for Jinx).
Soon, Silco grew accustomed to her multicolored icing on his monochrome life. What was disorienting became natural. The first time he glided out the Drop's door, one gloved hand trailing automatically behind him, before Jinx curled her pinkie finger through his and followed. The first time their clothes were sent to the same launderette above the marmalade factory, so they always held identical scents from season to season: strawberries in winter, oranges in summer. The first time he fixed her a proper breakfast of scrambled eggs, instead of the horrible fry-up of blood sausage that was only thing he'd ever bothered to cook. The first time he tucked her in at bedtime with an absent Goodnight, my lovely, and she bestowed on him a grotesquerie of nightly ripostes: Sweet dreams, Silly or Bite the bedbugs, Bossysocks, or his most hated, Bonne Nuit, Puddin.'
Confronted by these eroding boundaries, Silco expected his patience to likewise erode. It didn't. Yet it never extended to those in his orbit, either. His ruthlessness redoubled: a stranglehold over the Undercity.
For himself—and for Jinx.
(Is that fatherhood?)
Bit by bit, Silco got to know her nature as a mirror of his own: the flammable explosives wired to her history, the bright-eyed dramas blended with her humor.
Best of all, he got to know Jinx.
At her core, she was a sweet-natured imp—an imp whose moral compass veered as wildly as the legendary Ezreal's, so good or evil became simply a matter of desire. Her intellect was razor-sharp; her instincts were like a cat's. Like a cat, too, her loyalty was the irregular, impulsive kind driven by who best smoothed her fur and left her treats.
She soaked up Silco's attention gratefully. But if he withdrew it, she could bristle into wildness on a dime.
Silco seldom withdrew his attention. His life before Jinx was a barren thing. His life after was defined by a boisterous overflow. Somehow, she bypassed his kingpin's persona to speak directly to the lonely child inside. Their games were equally childish: Statues, Treasure Hunt, The Floor is Lava. Sometimes they'd play pranks on each other, the way he and Vander used to. Once, while he was napping on the sofa before a chem-barons' assembly, Jinx drew mustachioed curlicues on his upper-lip. He presided over the meeting none-the-wiser, unable to understand their blanched stares. Another time, on a blistering-hot day, too groggy to focus on paperwork, Silco let her drag him into a water-fight that escalated into full-scale war. Between them, they'd drenched the entire office. By the time Sevika walked in, they'd resembled a pair of drowned rats—and she'd angrily told them so.
Until Jinx's water-balloon landed splat on her face.
It was pure ridiculousness. But Silco secretly delighted in the ridiculous. In Jinx, he found the perfect foil. Like him, she adored riddles of all stripes—his own slanting towards deadpan dryness, hers irrepressibly slapstick. Like him, she had a prodigious memory paired with a vindictive streak—his own slow-creeping like poison, hers a nick-of-time catastrophe. Like him, her creativity bubbled up from the same inner-inferno as her violence—his expressed through speech and stratagems, hers through colors and chaos.
More intriguing than the sameness were her idiosyncrasies. For a minor eternity, she'd eat nothing but jellied eel pie, and pitch a screaming fit at the mildest variation. Crowds made her jitter gleefully as if powered by ten cups of coffee; her good cheer could erupt into hysteria at the drop of a hat. Her favorite color changed with her mood. She conversed with her bombs as equals, collected raven's feathers as lucky charms, and believed in wishing on shooting stars and shooting the monsters in her closet with equal fervency.
To the crew, Jinx's tendencies bordered on deranged. To Silco, they were ordinary. No different from a child unable to verbalize a tragedy, and acting it out with crayon-drawings and hand-puppets.
What disturbed him was the potent stew of self-hatred inside Jinx's skull. A stew that increasingly spilled over into visual and auditory hallucinations. They'd talked about the issue once or twice, a crosshatch of honesty. He'd told her about Vander, and the aftermath of his betrayal. The physical disfigurement he carried with him everywhere, and beneath that, hidden in the layers of himself, his brother's ghost, sunk like something at the bottom of the river.
Killing Vander had exorcized the ghost. Freed Silco.
Jinx was far from free.
On summer nights, rolling blackouts would cut like a blade through the Undercity's ambient noise. The unnatural silence would magnify the voices in Jinx's head. Sometimes, she'd erupt into hysterics, until Sevika slapped her hard enough to redden her cheeks. You're fine, for Janna's sake! Other times, Silco would intercede. He'd learnt a trick; untangling Jinx's frenzy with small touches. The nape of her neck, the pulse at her wrist, the spot behind her ear. A tactile lure to guide her home: Steady, child. You're safe.
Afterward—if she'd calmed enough for a change of scene—he'd say: "Fetch your boots. We'll go for a jaunt."
In the early days, they'd go by foot, with Sevika tailing at a distance for muscle. In later years, they'd go in Silco's glossy black motorcar, the opera window rolled down all the way and Jinx's arm laid along the edge, her head resting dreamily against it while the wind stirred her blue hair.
As sumpsnipes, Silco and Jinx had explored the Undercity like bats, guided by an instinctive echolocation. Now Silco showed her the Undercity from a different lens. Beyond the dusty pawn shops and the peepshow theaters. Beyond the scrapyards full of junk and the garbage bags taped over broken windows. Beyond the sidewalks that buckled like bubblegum and the lamps that fritzed like strobes.
He'd showed her Zaun—not its present but its potential.
Since boyhood, Silco had loved the city. But he was one of the few. Most, since they were knee-high, had talked endlessly of breaking free. Getting a leg-up, getting rich, getting out. Few succeeded. A sense of failure hung thick as the miasma in the Lanes. It sunk into everyone's bones, so they carried it wherever they went.
Which was nowhere.
"The Finger-Trap Fallacy," Silco told Jinx. "If you stay in one spot, you don't feel it. If you dare to expand, it constricts until you can't breathe."
Living under Piltover's boot had shrunk everyone. Forced them into lesser shapes and smaller dreams.
Except what are dreams? Liquid potential.
Piltover had no right to them, even as it stripped their own rights away breath by breath.
He showed Jinx the brightest and darkest dimensions of their home. Sometimes he took her to the Bridge, its bottom littered with the bones of those who'd pitted their will against Piltover's. Sometimes he took her to the starlit Smuggler's Cove, where shipping vessels full of cutthroats and children alike crossed into the dead of night into Bilgewater for a stab at freedom. He showed Jinx the fire-gutted splendor of Janna's Temple, its bombing the precursor to the first riots on the Day of Ash. He showed her the labyrinth of Oshra Va'Zaun, where Jinx skip-hopped among the vertiginous staircases to take in their shared history.
Other times, Silco had taken Jinx up to the Promenade where the nightlife throbbed. They'd stroll through the boutiques for luxury fabrics to send to his tailor, until Jinx teased him for being a dandy. Later, they'd stop at a poky little café someplace to share a stupendously-decorated sundae and two glasses of cherry soda. He took her to the best pubs under his ownership, where the bands played hot jazz, and Jinx would excitedly tug his sleeve and drag him to dance with her on the postage stamp of a stage, her clumsy little feet crisscrossing with his before she'd catch on with the flow and match him beat for beat. He took her to the smoky underlit pool halls, where he'd sip lager and talk shop with his pack of spies, with Jinx snatching the opportunity to palm loose coins from the tables while the grown-ups were preoccupied.
Afterwards, they'd walk down the cobbled streets at Bridgeside, a golden harp spanning the glittering river. They'd stand at the observation rail as the early-morning rays hit the skyline of Piltover, glossing it in warmth while banishing them into the shadow.
Silco would slide his coat around Jinx's shoulders and tell her about the city's history—and his own. The Day of Ash. Vander's betrayal. His stubborn allegiance to the status quo and Silco's own bitter sacrifices to overturn it.
And into her ear, he'd pass on his lessons.
On Piltover: They chop us off at the knees, then punish us if we dare to stand tall. On Enforcers: Never trust them as far as you can blow them up. On pacifism: A pipe dream for those terrified of tasting true freedom. On truth: A tool to be wielded for your own ends. On persona: For the world, be their sweetest dream or their worst nightmare. Alone, remain yourself. On trust: A phantom born on the inside. The hardest fact to feel, the easiest trick to feign. On love: Never chase it. Never debase yourself for it. On loyalty: Keep it close, and closely guarded.
Jinx, eyes darkly opaque, absorbed his words. Other times, a phrase of Silco's would arrest her thoughts, stealing her off down ugly corridors of memory. Her hand would grow clammy inside his own. In those moments, Silco would call her back with a story. His knowledge of Undercity folklore was encyclopedic. Since boyhood, he'd devoured tales of wandering ghouls and underwater monsters. They'd been his own safeguards against the worst monster of all: despair.
He shared with Jinx the tales of Kindred, the paired personification of death as Wolf and Lamb. Tales of Janna, the silvery protectress of Zaun in its darkest hour. Tales of the Veiled Lady, a dark enchantress who championed for the downtrodden.
Once, during those witching-hour stories, Jinx said, "You think I'd make a good champion?"
Silco tipped her a half-smile, "I daresay you would."
"But I'd be a monster champion. I'd scare off anyone who hurt Zaun."
"Like a guardian spirit?"
"Without the spirit-y stuff." She'd shrugged. "Bombs and bullets will do the trick."
Silco felt a strange pride stirring in his chest. "You'd need an insignia."
"In-sig-nia?"
"A symbol of personal power. All of Zaun's patrons have one. For Kindred, it's the spiral. Janna's is the staff. What would yours be?"
"Ooh! My monkey-face! And Fishbones! And—and—"
"Stick to one."
She pouted. "Why? Zaun should have plenty! One to scare Topside. One to keep the chem-gangs in line. And one just for you."
Silco crooked a brow. "Why me?"
"So you know I'm always closeby."
"Keeping me on a leash, are we?"
"Nuh-uh." She folded herself under the crook of his arm, round eyes aglow. "Just watching your back."
Silco's arm was already around Jinx. It was nothing to fit his palm to her shoulder and squeeze. She smiled—before snatching his hand and doodling on it with invisible letters. A cross, a zero.
Silco cocked his head. "What's that?"
"My insignature, silly."
"Insignia."
"Whatever."
Gently, Silco caged her fingers inside his own. "XO, hm?"
"Whatcha think?"
"That means something different for our business, child."
"Ecstasy and oxycodone?"
"By Kindred—where did you learn that?"
Jinx emitted a high-pitched giggle. "Finn asked if I wanted to try some."
"Finn will soon receive a visit from the crew. As to XO—it's an abbreviation for Executive Officer. A second-in-command."
Jinx pulled a face. "The Ogre."
"Correct."
Her eyes lit with a newfound mischief. "Well, I outrank Sevika. She's the XO on the streets. I'm the XO everyplace else!"
Too right, Silco thought fondly. Aloud, he asked, "So XO is your calling card for me?"
"XOXO," Jinx said triumphantly. "Hugs and kissies for the price of a boom."
"A shameless weaponizing of an acronym."
"Is it?"
"Don't play dumb."
Jinx giggled again. "Well, it fits. Wrong acronym, right intention." Her humor dissipated. "You always say the road to hell's paved with 'em."
Silco sobered in turn. "A champion doesn't belong in hell."
"Then where?"
"Zaun." He smiled into her upturned face. "Where else?"
Where else, indeed? Sometimes the question stalled Silco's brain. Where else, but the Undercity, would he have been given this child who might as well have been tailor-made to follow in his footsteps: a brighter echo of his nature, the ghost of a path traveled backwards?
Soon, Jinx began using her acronym exclusively for him. XOXO. He'd find it inside her stickynotes on his glass-topped desk—shopping-lists for bomb ingredients; to-do-lists for testing them. He'd issue the orders to his crew. Then he'd sign off the notes with sharp slashes of his own—XOXO. Later, the stickynotes would be replaced with tokens of her gratitude: colorful pictures, wind-up monkeys, smoke bombs.
By now, Silco ought to have tired of the gifts. Yet with Jinx, every small moment was a gift.
(Is that fatherhood?)
Silco's own gift to Jinx—the most symbolic—was her workspace. Not at the Drop, but in Oshra Va'Zaun's caverns. His old walk-up was leased for a lifetime. So was the area beneath it: an abyssal grotto that housed a colossal underground turbine. Long defunct, it had become a cote to roosting bats. Moody blue shadows across its surface deepened into bottomless blacks belowground.
It was both spacious and secretive. A maw to swallow the thunder of bombshells. Or spit out thousands more.
"Where," Jinx asked, "are we going?"
Her tone, as Silco led her through the tunnels, was curious. Likewise, she held his hand without an ounce of fear. It was her fifteenth birthday; he'd promised her a treat. Anyone else would suspect that Silco was luring them someplace isolated for an ambush. Hell, they'd be right. This spot was an old favorite for dumping corpses.
Silco squeezed Jinx's hand.
"You'll see."
Inside the darkened workshop, he asked Jinx to shut her eyes. She obeyed. Silco struck a wooden match, then lit the connected gridwork of lanterns. The firefly glow spread to encompass the hugeness of the cavern. He'd already ordered it filled with crates of fertilizer as fine as black clay, the best low-freezing dynamite, smooth-grained powders, barrels of premium grade fuel oil, inky blue bottles of phosphorous, slabs of C4 as dense as bread-loaves, and enough metallurgic doodads to construct a fighter plane.
Gently, he touched Jinx's shoulder. "This is all yours."
Jinx's eyes snapped open. Something shone in her expression, a chemical sheen that contorted her features out of blankness and into stupefaction. Then she broke into a cascade of the most astounding music Silco had ever head.
Laughter.
Suddenly, she was everywhere. Running her hands along the gleaming spines of blowtorches, skipping her fingers off the candy-colors of grenades, blowing the dust off old tomes smuggled from Topside. She'd bounced from spot to spot with Silco following her, and bestowed on each item her full visual and tactile devotion. Nothing escaped her notice: big, small, ugly, beautiful, useless, useful. Silco could practically see the future schematics for weaponry percolating in her brain.
Finally, she flung her arms around Silco. With his own arms pinned to his sides, he was too stunned to react. His shock deepened when she tugged his head at level with hers, dotting half of his face with kisses. The ruined edge of his brow, the nicked bridge of his nose, the scarred point of his cheekbone. The hideous convolutions of his skin didn't daunt her. They never had.
Nuzzling close, she beamed, "Thank you, Daddy."
It wasn't volleyed in a prankster's lisp. It wasn't crooned in a whore's falsetto. Jinx imbued it with the simplicity of a child.
Daddy.
Never a word Silco had applied to himself. Least of all with regards to Jinx. Yet it drove through him like a spike, shooting across his psyche in a jagged fault line that split its surface in two. His dead black heart seized so hard it threatened to rip his chest apart.
He said: "Don't call me that."
And yet the gripe was negated by his gentle hug.
They'd entered the cave hand-in-hand: him leading, her following. They exited side-by-side: a loosely-twined intimacy, heads close together and footsteps in tandem. Sevika was waiting at the mouth of the cave, cigarette hanging from her lips. Spotting them, her dark eyes took in everything, then narrowed with an understanding that went deeper than Silco cared to admit.
(Is that fatherhood?)
The years melted by. Silco's empire melted out of the shadows and across the Undercity, like the dark legs of a spider unfolding from its hiding-hole.
Jinx unfolded too, out of diffidence and into deadliness. Bit by bit, she'd forfeited the weaker parts of herself to survive. Memories rewired; morals eroded. Her reputation as his enforcer was a mass of chilling contradictions. Some called her the apple of his deformed eye—half-protégé, half-paramour. Others called her his loose cannon—off her leash, out of her mind. Among his crew, her epithets ran the gauntlet from playful to petrifying. For Ran, she was Bossgirl. For Dustin, Li'l Miss. For Lock, Bit of ghostberry.
Silco simply called her Jinx.
Their time together had deepened from a soft pretzel of closeness into a tight knot, almost as one body. The crew took it all in without being told anything. The way Jinx had supplanted Singed as Silco's top gadgeteer. The way she'd superseded Sevika as his second-in-command. She'd even taken charge of dosing his eye with Shimmer; Silco no longer trusted anyone else with the delicate task.
His iron control over his network never fell to the wayside. A craftsman must always sharpen of his tools. But they were tools of a different order: expedient, and yet expendable. In the midst of business, they served Zaun; they serviced his needs. But Jinx was unlike any of the others: irreplaceable in her complexity.
(Is that fatherhood?)
He'd seldom struggled with the answer. Zaun sat front and center in his field of vision. Everything else was peripheral.
What mattered was the Undercity's freedom. What mattered was legacy.
Until the night he found Jinx on the bridge. Bodies rnging her in a helter-skelter like moons around a dying comet. Her skin the color of old bone where it wasn't pocked in blackened divots. Her pulse misfiring erratically because her atrophied system hadn't yet accepted that she was officially dead.
Jinx couldn't die.
To kill her would kill Zaun.
It would kill Silco—and leave behind a creature of hollowness and the rawest extremity of rage. A thing that would fill its body with anything, everything. Piltover's blood. Zaun's own. The night Jinx was resurrected at Singed's table, her veins full of Shimmer, Silco had stared at the unholy pink pouring out of her eye sockets. He'd known in that moment he'd dealt his legacy a blow every bit as awful as the one Piltover had coming to it.
And he'd gone to war.
Full disclosure: Silco never wanted to be a father. But wishes are for fools, and possession is nine-tenths of the law. He'd refused to let Piltover take Jinx—or let Vi to repossess her. He'd refused to lose—and paid the cost.
His dream manifested; his daughter mutilated.
Now he can only repay in increments what he stole from Jinx. In days and months and decades. He wants her with him, growing stronger as Zaun grows stronger, never leaving his side. A monster's approximation of love, but those are the parameters of Silco's existence. That is all he knows.
That, and Jinx.
He will do anything to protect his precious child. Anything in the wretched world.
(Is that fatherhood?)