Final chapter of this diptych thingy! Thank you so much for the delicious comments and meta that y'all have shared with me! It's always awesome to find oneself in such good company ;)
Tw: for eye-horror, needles, abuse of sex workers, language, descriptions of violence, suicide references and generally questionable morality.
Bigger tw, as ever, for more questionable parenting, and the utter lack of boundaries. On the upside (?) at least there is family fluff. Or some semblance of it.
Waste no worry for the world
Let it be a tragedy of love and glory
while they wait by gates of pearl
we'll be building palaces in purgatory
~"Villainous Thing" by Counterfeit Arcade
Dawn.
Granules of sunlight burn between the gaps of Piltover's skyline. In the Undercity, it barely penetrates except as hallucinogenic streaks in the smog. It is Janna's jolliest jape—a blanket of warmth for the hundreds above, and the barest tracers of heat for thousands below.
At every turn, they starve us.
At every turn, we survive.
Silco sits in his office, stirring through leftover paperwork with an idle fingertip. His jacket hangs neatly on the back of his chair; subterranean light strikes off two glasses chockful of ice-cubes on his desk. The small matter of murder has been dealt with. His team has recovered the container from the Pump Station. The Drop has been scrubbed spotless.
Silco is ready to retire for the day. His left eye is throbbing: the Shimmer-dose is due. He is also staving off the beginnings of a headache, aggravated by the deafening music.
Sevika doesn't help. All the way upstairs, she'd kept muttering darkly about heads-ups and boundaries and collateral damage. Silco let her rant herself into hoarseness until, as expected, she'd grudgingly admitted that Xivic's reports hadn't added up for a few weeks now. Still—she could've done without the goddamned blast. Her ears are still ringing.
"Offing Durya wasn't necessary," she says, referring to Xivic's milkmaid.
"We'll buy another one."
"Talent like hers doesn't come cheap."
She was a good fuck, is what Silco hears.
Pouring a dram of liqueur coffee into one glass, he pushes it towards Sevika—condolences, acknowledgement. Sevika slugs the drink back, tiredness of the crazy night creasing the edges of her expression. Silco's own stays ironed flat.
"Xivic's death," he says, "opens new items on the agenda."
"Namely?"
"Offense and defense."
Sevika's brow twitches in distaste. "You think his sons will retaliate?"
"Make sure they don't."
"How? Flowers and a goddamn sympathy card?"
"Deaths first. Funerals after."
"The grandkids too?"
Silco doesn't smile. But his mouth shapes itself into that of a carnivore, a consumer of living things.
"Naturally."
There are no exceptions in a war. No men, women or children. Only soldiers of Zaun. Only loyalty. It's how he has succeeded so far—by locking troublemakers inexorably inside his jaws. By killing them before they kill him, and he's killed plenty: by himself or by proxy. If they underestimate him as old, or slow, or burnt-up—so much the better. They expire as another one of his statistics
Sevika nods, but heavily, her skull still weighed by implicit gripes. "Sir?"
"What?"
"This is a dangerous game to play."
"Wasn't it always?"
"Not if it shortens your life as sure as grey follows day."
A near-smile nicks the corner of Silco's lips. "Chem-brats are hardly a threat, Sevika."
"I don't mean them." She shies a glare at him, barely a dark flash of her dragon-eyes. "I mean Jinx."
Silco stares. His expression is neither hot nor cold, not emotional enough to swing at either polarity. But his left eye kicks off a blistering-red intensity. The right eye holds in its blue a seeping darkness. It is purely instinct—the primal part of him that exists with one brute motive: to protect what's his.
"Fighting words make fine epitaphs," he warns softly.
Sevika falters but doesn't flinch. Usually, the dripping venom in his voice sends lackeys scurrying. But as his second-in-command, she has developed a small immunity to it. Enough to stand her ground and say her piece. In matters of private life, she has always kept a sizeable gulf between them, the rough-hewn harbor to his dead black ocean.
But where it concerns business—where it concerns Zaun—
"I've always respected your vision," Sevika says. "Your methods are brutal, and you play the long game. It's why you get more done than the chem-barons combined. It's why I side with you. This is a complicated enterprise, with lots of cogs to keep the machine spinning, and each of us cuts a profit."
"Apt metaphor. Through from you? Unexpected."
"This ain't about poetry."
Her eyes measure Silco for a reaction. She gets none. His expression doesn't alter, nor does he stir or shift on his chair. Yet the stillness, the utter lack of movement, is predatory. Sevika knows—because Silco can trace the knot pulsing at the underside of her jaw. A weak spot: the one where the all nerves bunch up. The one where teeth sink in and the hemorrhaging blood saturates the water.
Somewhere in her own reptile brain, Sevika reckons with the risks. Makes her mind up—live slow, die stupid etc—and forges on.
"Our cause doesn't need loose cannons," she says. "Not at this stage. She has to go."
"Go where?"
"Down to Hell, or up the River. Whatever cuts her loose."
Silence floats in the greenish dust-motes between them.
It isn't the doomsday silence. There is no gunshot, no detonation, no dagger. Silco doesn't operate on explosive extremes. Exact, calculated movements—that is his approach. A patient shark in the water, resistant to time and pressure. He pours himself a shot of liqueur coffee the same way. Exact, calculated.
Ice-cubes clink together as he takes a sip. Their refraction flickers across the scar slitting his upper lip.
"She disturbs you."
Sevika's eyebrow does its telltale twitch. "What?"
"Jinx. She disturbs you." Impassive, he swirls his drink around. "Lots of cogs in the machine, as you say. Each one plays a part. Even you, Sevika. You keep the rest of them in line, and that is of great value to me. Jinx is a different story. You hold no sway over her, and that puts you at a disadvantage."
Sevika shakes her head brusquely, "It's more than that."
"Oh?"
"She isn't right in the head. We all know it."
"Who is 'we'?"
The tip of Silco's index finger traces back and forth over the rim of his glass. A kiss-petal darkly smudges the corner. Jinx's blackberry lipgloss. A nighttime ritual—she gets the first (and only) sip of his tipple. Sweetening your drink, she calls it.
The only sweetness he permits himself, in the burning aftertaste of this nightly hellscape.
Scowling, Sevika drags a cheroot out of her inside pocket, biting off the tip between her teeth. "We as in our crew." Spitting out the nub into his ashtray. "We as in our network." Flame kindling cherry; smoke permeating the air. "She runs too fucking hot. Like she wants to torch down everything in sight."
"Show me a person here who doesn't."
"That's different. One of us gets a screw loose, we still keep it wired on the job. Off-hours, we keep our shit to ourselves—or find something to take it out on. Not Jinx. She turns the whole Undercity upside down so it's as crazy as she is."
"The unpredictability has its uses."
"Not when it gets our best people killed!"
Sevika's slow-simmering frustration cracks—finally—into molten rage. Her fist slams down on his desk.
Silco counted on it. There are upsides to Sevika's brute diligence and her willingness to shoot straight—literally or metaphorically. It's why she is an excellent left-hand. It's also why she'll never be anything else. Her mind is bound by the gritty practicalities: a whiskey-in-my-flask, knife-in-my-boot attitude to life.
Zaun and self-preservation are her mainstays. She has no imagination to scale greater heights.
Silco doesn't fault her. The Undercity is full of her type. Home to people who've truncated themselves to fit the parameters of their prison. They come from strong stock. But they are robbed of ambition: sick rats in a cage. The streets he's roamed his whole life seethe with that same sickness. A generational malaise.
Whereas Jinx?
She is the best of Zaun. Escape velocity at its purest; the embodiment of wild, wanton, dizzying possibility. Nothing—not even Topside—can wall her off. With each crazy caper of creativity, she reminds Silco of what the Undercity can accomplish. Reminds him that they deserve to burn a slingshotting curve out of the gutter and across Runeterra's stratosphere.
He waits until Sevika takes a breath, flexing the anger out of her shoulders. More quietly, she says, "Tonight isn't Jinx's first kiss-up with collateral damage. Last week, it was the explosion at Entresol. Bolt and Miryam were burnt to a crisp. They were idiots, but still our best tracers northside. Before that, it was Nabo. The shock inhalation from Jinx's rocket broiled his lungs." She grits her teeth. "Yeah, they were all grunts. But they died on my watch. Not for Zaun—but thanks to a trigger-happy crackpot."
"Nasty word. Crackpot."
"Unless it fits."
"Presumptuous as your prognosis."
"How so, sir?"
The smoothness of Silco's voice drops to a liquid sibilation. "Because Jinx's efforts are for Zaun."
He sets the drink down on the desk; it thuds hollowly, glass on glass. A sense of two surfaces colliding, the more brittle of the two giving way. Daughter versus duty, fatherhood versus fatherland. A dichotomy that Silco finds it harder to reconcile with each passing day.
Jinx is not his flesh-and-blood. She can be unpredictable, sullen and exasperatingly bratty. She frequently flies beyond his orbit of understanding. Yet she holds inside her the same irresistible gravity as Zaun—a ferocious pull at his deepest viscera, a pull indistinguishable from destiny.
Destiny.
Big word, like loyalty or epiphany. It fills his mouth the same way: the penny-bright taste of blood.
His gaze snaps on Sevika's. Now she does flinch. His mismatched eyes are are unearthly, black as black, socked deep as holes in his skull. Yet they are mouths too. They bite, they chew, they swallow: a pair of carnivorous teeth consuming everything in their path.
"Cogs in a machine," Silco says, his voice gone silky smooth. "I'll run with the analogy. It serves its purpose—as you do. A sturdy widget, like all meat and metal. But expendable, like meat and metal ultimately is. Jinx? She is different." Fingertips steeple beneath his chin, the awfulness of his mismatched stare unbroken. "Remind me. The explosion at entresol. What did it gain us?"
Sevika swallows, but keeps steady. "The northside territories, and their gangs."
"The rocket that martyred Nabo. What price did it fetch?"
"Enough for five factories Uppside."
"Our war for Zaun. What price does that fetch?"
"Freedom."
"Well then." His hands spread with farcical matter-of-factness. One leg folding over the other. "Freedom drinks its weight in blood. Just as war machines eat their weight in cogs. But Jinx's role goes beyond that. You see: inside the machine is the engine, which few know of and fewer still understand. The source that powers our enterprise. It is volatile. Combustible. But without it, everything else falls to pieces."
Beads of sweat dot Sevika's temples. But she manages to get her mouth around the question, "What about after Zaun?"
"After Zaun?"
"After the Undercity is freed. After the machinery is packed up. Each widget finds a different role. We may be expendable, but we have other uses." Her full lips flatten. "What about Jinx. That girl is built to power the war machine. Nothing else. Once it's dismantled, what will you do? Lock her in a box? She's already sick. The stagnation will make her sicker."
"She's resilient. She'll serve Zaun in greater ways."
"Or follow her natural path. Destruction."
"I'll keep her grounded."
"You can't keep a wild element, Silco. It eats itself alive, or it kills the keeper."
Silco stares. Sevika is just barely quaking—the skin and bones on her skull twitching with hidden crackles of rage. Then he understands it isn't rage. It is fear. This battleaxe of a woman. A Valkyrie built to weather the biggest storms. Yet she is afraid. Not of him, or his wrath. She is afraid of his death—and what it portends.
Jinx: unchained.
Unhinged and at large.
(Crisis, causality, culmination).
Sevika says, "There's plenty about you and Jinx that I look past. You share the same quarters. The same goddamn bed. I don't tell. You take off at strange times, wrapped up together like lovers. I don't remark. She crawls all over you and shoots you up with Shimmer nightly. In the mornings, her lipstick is on your skin and your cologne is on hers. I stay deaf and blind. You call her your daughter in private; I call her the same in public. I don't snitch."
"A shining model of the Black Lanes," Silco says, deadpan.
"Just a loyal cog."
"Laying it on thick, aren't you?"
"Just getting my point across. That girl is sick. And she brings out the worst in you. Not the kind that gets shit done. The kind that makes heads roll. Heads of good soldiers. Soldiers we could use for our cause. Shit."
She lets off a jittery breath, and finally wrenches her eyes away from the penetrating vileness of his own. Silco counted on that too. Sevika is one of the few who can look closely at him. But never for long—his gaze has a rapacious effect; it seizes the most secret scraps of weakness inside you and yanks them out like entrails from a gut-wound.
He watches her drag unsteadily at her cheroot, as if they've finished something heavy together. At length, she says, "I just want to know…"
"Hmm?"
"I want to know if your judgment on Jinx is 20/20. Be a shame if it were otherwise."
"Trying to hold me over a fire, Sevika?"
"Is it working?"
Silco's mouth rolls into the crooked shape of a smile. "Twist my arm a little."
"So Jinx blows mine off? Again? Screw that."
A moment passes, in which Sevika finishes her cheroot. She grinds out the stub in Silco's ashtray, smoke twisting through the air with a sweetish whiff. The lull has restored her equilibrium. Her face is no longer contorted beneath a cracking surface. Her features are smooth again: dragonfire and stone. The features of his stalwart left-hand.
"I'm just saying," she mutters, "As long as you have Zaun in your sightlines, I have your back."
"You have my back."
"No matter who Jinx blows up, or what fucked-up shit I see. Or unsee."
"Hmm."
Silco's tone holds a complexity of textures: rough contemplation or smooth complicity. Then he slides open his desk drawer. A velvet bag clinks with coins. He hefts its weight in splayed fingers, tossing it underhanded. Sevika catches it deftly in mid-air.
"The hell's this for?"
Silco's features have snapped shut like a box, all calm angularity. The maw of blackness in his gaze is the same, closing over, as if beneath a shark's backrolled eyes.
"Let's have no misunderstanding," he says, "about whatever you think you saw or heard."
"Don't need a bribe."
"Consider it a bonus." His silence is deliberate: stirring the waters to catch the prey. "Your father, rotting at Dredge prison, deserves a nice neighborhood to retire to."
Sevika jerks as if mauled. Confusion, rage, realization—all erupting and extinguishing in one eyeblink. Silco takes it all in, with the satisfying sensation of chomping a deep crescent down to the bone. Savoring, in the moment before the first scream, that primal invasion of privacy and the bright freshet of pulsating blood.
Sevika growls, "I swear to almighty Janna—"
Silco cuts her off. "Enjoy your bonus. Treat your old man to dinner. Remember: you are more than a loyal cog. You are a vanguard of Zaun. As long as you remember that, I have your back."
Sevika stares at him for several seconds, a rigid set in her shoulders, a tautness to her jaw. She looks like she's rolling a dozen red-hot words inside her mouth. Scalding herself with them.
Silco is unmoved. In the Lanes, alliances balance the blade's edge between ally and adversary. But allies grow complacent with time; spoiled by the accolades awarded to them and greedy for more. An adversary is loyal by default, because their status is rarely secure. They have more to prove. More to lose.
He and Sevika understand this. They are leftovers of the old guard; their shared language is one of debts and damage. He owes her his life; she owes him hers. It's what facilitates a level of honest exchange between them—and makes each threat a game of dead-man's hand, no blinds or bluffs.
So Sevika forces her temper down, and nods. The encroaching daylight of Piltover flattens the shadows of the Undercity into thin arteries between buildings. Her hostility flattens the same way, replaced by the hardheaded brass of her everyday manner, a façade just barely thinned by fatigue.
"You're a real piece of work, Silco," she says. "I might have a few mental issues. But you are as fucked up as they come."
"You're dead on your feet. Call it a day."
"Same goes for you."
"Eventually."
When has he truly last slept? An eternity ago. Before Vander stole his eye. Since that night, Silco has existed in a different world—the inverse of human comforts, human nourishments. The Undercity thrives in a state of permanent midnight, and Silco powers through with its unnatural sluicings as sustenance.
Blood. Drugs. Bonemeal.
"Report back in seven bells," he says.
"Make it eight, for piss' sake. I'm beat."
"Seven-and-a-half."
They shake hands with customary briskness—her battering-ram to his flick-knife—before she goes to his door.
Over her shoulder, she asks, "Send you up a nightcap?"
Distractedly, Silco smooths a hand through his hair. The pomade is drying out, jet-black strands tangling with steel-grey as they fall over his forehead. "Make it a double."
"We've got newcomers. Sisters. From an Uppside family that defaulted on their debts to a chem-baron. She took their daughters as collateral." Sevika smiles sidelong and sly. "Sweet things. Might even be virgins."
"I'll judge for myself."
"Play nice. Don't bite."
She exits without a backward glance.
The door closes heavily in her wake. Shut in his office, alone, Silco finally exhales a sound indistinguishable from a bitten-off snarl.
A cigar in clipped; the lighter sparked and snapped shut. He smokes fast, rolling off the ashes with a sharp hand. His last smoke for the day. Hopefully his last headache for the day. He is on his last per diem of patience with his underlings.
Oh, Sevika isn't the problem. Nor was Xivic. Their sloppy acts of insubordination are inconsequential. They signal weakness, not strength. Rancor, not revolt. The former can be strongarmed—psychologically, physically. The latter can be snuffed out in double-time.
Silco is seething because he needs sleep. And, because, if truth be told, in point of fact, he is suffering, suffering with the Undercity as it endures another day, the sun rising above and their lot staying the same below: scared, struggling, shit-stained. Subjugated. The immensity of the world above squashes them flat: a treasure box of towers and trees and teeming possibilities. People whose lives are liquid with potential, ready to flow in any direction—accountants, attorneys, songbirds, scientists.
And below? A reversed polarity—the dungeon. Its walls closing in tighter, night after night. Its invisible pressures cracking the toughest of them until they pop. So many lives crammed together, seething and scrabbling, one grotesque heartbeat. They squander the days in their petty games for survival, and when night comes, they scurry in the dark for slops and scrapings. Or else death finds them and take its due.
Either way, they are doomed. Today, tomorrow, or the day after.
Until all is ashes.
Until we rise.
That is why Silco's war machine drinks blood and eats cogs. Not for Sevika or Xivic. Not for the chem-barons and the lackeys and the hundreds of in-betweens. For Zaun. For its barest hairbreadth of advantage over Piltover, with its oh-so-glorious Gates and its place in the sun. Outthinking it, outhustling it, outrunning it—until they achieve escape velocity.
The Shimmer is just a means. Jinx, and her magnum-opus-in-progress, is the end.
The queasy greenness of morning stains the office fully now. Silco lets his head loll back against his seat. Silhouetted against the window, the curve of his adam's apple slides on an expelled pall of cigar smoke.
No rest for the wicked.
Nor for you and I, my Jinx.
A drop of liquid hits his throat.
Silco jackknifes into violence. Contact to his throat connects to a killing-switch in his brain: a circuit blowout of adrenaline. Instinctively, his hand goes to the blade in his boot—Vander's parting gift. The other hand lifts wide-splayed to his neck. It comes away wet.
On his fingertips, a smear of blood. Brilliantly red, the color of a torn vein.
Silco's eyes slice to the ceiling.
Shapes dangle there. He blinks—once, twice—before they resolve into focus. Comprehension overrules confusion.
Fuck.
Above, in the rafters: not the faintest creak. No skittering spider-girl. No smile.
Just a collection of decapitated skulls. They hang from hooks: neatly severed at the throat, and drained of the last vestiges of blood. Each one's expression is hideously contorted: an immortalized rictus. Still, Silco recognizes the shovel-shaped jawbones of Xivic's clan. Sons and grandsons, lined up like ducks on death-row. Neon letters dousing their foreheads.
Z-A-U-N
Jinx's own version of a twisted nightcap.
Silco shuts his eyes, one bloodied hand rising to touch his temple. Under his fingertips, he feels the throbbing headache deepen into a full-body vibrato. Exhaustion mutating into something else: a bittersweet exultation.
(Lunatic, lamia, livewire.)
His epiphany is just around the corner.
Dusk slices over the Undercity.
Quick and sharp, it cuts to the bone with an ambient coldness—moist and foully metallic. The air is soaked with gases, the tiered tenements of the Lanes obscured by the smoke coughing from the chemical plants. Coughing, coughing, coughing—like hundreds of its citizens. They keep fighting the phantoms of smog, decay, death, and losing badly. A war-zone with plenty of collateral damage.
Choking to death on Piltover's hubris.
In bed, Silco stirs awake. The bedding has been dragged off him. His half-clothed body makes a crooked starfish across the humid sheets: the facsimile of a drowning man. Full dark will come in another bell. Maybe less. He will already be up by then; he never lollygags. He just opens his good eye, and there he is, on his feet, fully conscious one moment, fully dressed the next.
It's an act of brute willpower more than wiling flesh. Most days, his body feels like a caved-in mineshaft: nothing inside but dust and bone. From time to time, he misses the whip-crack vigor of his youth. But the Undercity deals its citizens a rough hand: either you grow old, or you die.
Silco accepts the former with a grudging grace. The latter—hah.
Submission and sinking; they're similar sensations.
Rolling to his side, Silco checks the pocketwatch vying for space at the bedside table with piles of wind-up monkeys and an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. Five o' clock. He's slept for approximately six bells. Good enough. He is ready to get moving. Bad dreams have polluted his rest. Left his mind spinning at an adrenalized velocity; his muscles primed to kill or be killed.
The nightcap was no good, either. The two sisters Sevika sent up to his office were as mediocre as the next pair of whores: all dull eyes and practiced docility. They were also plainly terrified of him. Their caresses held the jitteriness of a nervous tic; their voices failed to modulate beneath the simulated desire a bone-deep tremor of panic.
Younger, Silco would've been put off. Older, he revels in his monstrosity—as much as he revels in anything at all.
He took care to leave no marks. But mercy isn't doled out for free, and Silco exists within the parameters of what he is: a rotten-cored bastard. He'd fucked them with the same spiteful vehemence that once ran like blood down his eye to mix with the riverside. The older sister kept trying to protect the younger from the worst of it. That was an amusing game: letting her barter herself for the vilest acts. Letting her believe she was shielding, with her body, her sister's last shred of innocence.
Futility and farce.
In the end, he'd dragged the younger girl down on top of her hyperventilating sister on the sofa, crushing them breast to breast. He'd climbed on top of them, their damp hair tangled together across their flushed faces, and he'd exorcised into them the last dregs of his pent-up fury at Topside, a buffet of quivering orifices. He'd clocked the exact moment they stopped struggling—not with him but their own sweet illusions The moment they gave over to him with real sighs, both pairs of legs spreading smooth as Noxian buttermilk. Bodies left smirched and sweat-streaked and shuddering when he finally rolled off.
He'd met their eyes—the good one half-lidded blue ennui, the bad one pulsating red emptiness—and he'd made sure they knew it too. This was what survival cost in the Lanes. This was dying in the name of living.
That was bells ago.
Since then, he's bathed and ordered a good steam-cleaning for his sofa. Still, he can feel the lingering imprint of the encounter through his body. The same way he'd once felt Vander's fingers around his throat: ten burning points of hatred branded into his skin.
Funny. He'd used to share lovers with Vander under this very roof, once upon a time. Life had been kinder then. Silco was kinder too; people met his eyes with a smile rather than a shock-spasm. Granted, he was never a heartbreaker. Compared to Vander's brawny charisma, his raw-boned gloominess was easy to overlook. Yet whenever he and Vander were together, they'd always spun an indefinable alchemy: a double-act that drew attention like fillings to a magnet. The closeness between them made everyone else feel as if they belonged too.
Silco remembers those days, as if his own heart beat in Vander's chest.
Now, he roots around his own ribcage, in search of what's no longer there.
Sitting up, Silco plucks a moisturized pad off the convex of his left eye. A necessity, or the eyeball gets tacky as a peeled cherry. His vision blurs and sharpens. From the window, he can see the cityscape: the dark sweep of the river, the hazy smear of smog, the turrets and towers like glittering bar-graphs.
His suite is above the Drop—an all-seeing aerie. The rooms are renovated from Vander's heyday: sleek, spacious and softly-lit. Two bedrooms with a single conjoined bathroom, a parlor and a kitchen. He's had the walls soundproofed. The windows are fitted with special glass. Sensors are located at strategic points around the entrances and exits.
Silco never succumbs to the illusion of safety. Threats can lurk at each corner. Even in spaces you've known all your life. Still, these rooms hold for him a fond acquaintance. Off-limits to lackeys; barred-off to business. Nobody is permitted to set foot inside.
Nobody except him and Jinx.
Jinx, who dozes beside him: a shape swaddled in his stolen bedding. Only her blue head shows, like a berry topping a creampuff. But Silco's altered breathing pings off her uncanny senses. Between one blink and the next, she ripples awake. Two eyes glittering at him, sharp little stars. A hand on his arm, hotly clammy and ghost-pale. A giggle in his ear, crackly as static and yet impossibly sweet.
For the first time since Vander's betrayal, Silco doesn't feel alone.
"Hello, Jinx," he says.
Pouncing, she hugs him from behind. Her body is limber as a spider. She encircles him entirely, her arms sliding around his chest, her fingers knitting themselves across his heart. Her long legs hook around his waist, heels digging into his thighs. Her pretty skull burrows against the sharp dorsal ridge of his spine. His back is rough as sharkhide: mottlings of chemical burns from the mines, divots from stray shrapnel from the Enforcers' gunfire during the uprising, shank wounds from an ambush in Stillwater. Yet he feels her warm breath melting into his scar-webbed skin.
It isn't a tender embrace. She locks him in a death-grip: Silco half-expects a set of fangs to sink into his neck.
Space is vital to him. But Jinx is the exception to his every rule. She is fickle with her intimacies, giving them away to everyone or no one. Sucking them into her deranged orbit, spinning them into a tizzy and spitting them back out. But with Silco, she clings and doesn't let go.
Silco doesn't mind. How better to let Jinx be Jinx, than by accepting the peculiar way she's made?
(Tyrant, terror, treasure.)
"Late morning?" he says, drowsiness rasping his voice to a lower register.
"Oh, you know." Her rasp matches his: soprano to baritone. Like daughter, like father. "Just toolin' and tinkerin'."
"Anything special?"
"You'll see."
"See what?"
She giggles but doesn't elaborate.
Sleep has restored Silco's mind to its usual dimensions: a stronghold where steel-tipped nightmares grow. Dusk is when he dishes out the most critical damage, so he can avoid any ill-timed decisions later in the day, when his patience begins waning. He is ready to hit the war-room, begin re-strategizing and drafting new tactical matrixes. With Xivic's entire clan gone—thanks in no small part to Jinx—his sprawling assets are Silco's for the taking, provided he acts fast, and hits hard.
The victory isn't in the viciousness itself. It's in the end-game: the raison d'etre of his network, his dominating pattern in warfare.
The Undercity united under one rule, by any means, against Piltover. A black hole opening in the center of their sun.
If I summon the chem-barons this moment—
Jinx strokes a palm across his cheekbone. Silco exhales, his good eye closing in half-languor. He feels the pulse of her heartbeat in her fingertips. She traces the peeling skin of his left side, her thumb catching at a wedge of scar-tissue that is threatening to crack. He must take the Shimmer soon, or else it will break like charring paper, and bleed.
"Your face is all scratchy," Jinx says.
"The dose is overdue."
"So what're ya waiting for, silly?"
Hand on his chest, shoving him flat. Silco's world tilts and topples.
"Jinx!"
He should make a show of paternal obdurateness. But his tone with Jinx lacks the requisite bite; gingerbread instead of gravel. He is irritated. He is relieved. The moments when she gives him the medicine aren't a tug-of-war but a state of equilibrium, a sense that he needs this little firecracker of impulse and intellect who since their first meeting has so messily, awfully, utterly needed him.
And now he stares upside-down at Jinx. Her eyes in the pallor of her porcelain-doll face are ringed in shadow, and the color of a bone-deep bruise. The rest of her is the same. Blue veins of unbound hair and bloodshot pinks of faded greasepaint, with microscopic motes of gunpowder strewn in between. All of Zaun's pollutants, and all of its loveliness, bundled together into one gangly girl.
It wallops Silco every time. Jinx's face: a stolen moment of serenity.
"Stabbing time!"
"Get on with it."
Her little smile is devilish, lower lip is caught between her teeth. "What's the magic woooord?"
"Show no mercy."
His answer changes every time. Last week, it was Time is money, the week before, Fuck the police.
Jinx slams the Shimmer cartridge into the injector. She loads everything like a gun; Silco wields everything like a blade. The irony isn't lost on either of them.
She perches on his chest, legs astride his ribcage. Her weight is warm, the muscles wiry, her erratic energies grounded abruptly in flesh. Silco's flesh. It would feel wrong in any other scenario. If he were aroused; if this were a different dynamic, a different need. But Jinx is he, and he is Jinx. The connectivity is never more effortless than in these moments where the open secret of their shared scars in seen-to and salved.
Jinx aligns the injector with his eye socket. Her face, with rarity, is perfectly still.
"Ready?"
"Say the rhyme."
"Cross our hearts," Jinx recites solemnly.
"Watch them die."
"Stick a needle."
"In my eye."
She pumps the stuff into his pupil. The lancet clicks, the needle sinking in, shoving out. Pain. His eyeball a fiery pincushion. The Shimmer radiates through his cranial nerve; it pierces deep, the thinnest thread of fire and yet gripping the breadth of his musculature like a cardiac collapse.
Silco grips his own kneecaps, so as not to thrash. Forces himself to breathe. Forces himself to remember it is for his own good. In micro-doses, Shimmer is as good as an antimetastatic: it thwarts the spread of necrosis, a heat-seeking missile against tumorous growths. It keeps him alive, keeps him fighting, another day.
For Zaun. For Jinx.
Still, Silco hates its necessity. Hates it, with a coldness that congeals like tar in an addict's lungs. Hates it, because with each shot, he sinks deeper into the certainty that he can never walk away from it.
You can't disown something that fills your very veins.
A purple droplet leaks from his eyeball. He knuckles it off. The room quivers vertiginously. The red ember of his iris floats as if underwater. Everything is distant and unmoored and unreal. The only anchorage is Jinx. She is already up and off him. But her small hand reaches out to touch his hairline, fingertips passing and repassing. The pain recedes. Silco regains his self-possession—first his extremities, with a curl of fingers and toes, then the rest of him.
"I'm sorry," Jinx says.
"You did nothing wrong, child."
Jinx looks at the injector in her hands with a pitiable expression. It is a sleeker model than the original. She'd redesigned it herself. A finer calibration, a smoother infusion. She'd hoped it would ease his suffering. That it doesn't do its job perfectly is a failure in her mind, and it scalds her. Tears sheening her eyes.
She thinks Silco gives a damn about his own pain.
"If you want—" she says.
"Hm?"
"I can get more schematics from Singed. Upgrade the lancet-holder. Mine's more like a fuel injector. Maybe it needs a tweak in the valve spring. Something to speed up the ol' in-and-out."
"No need."
"I can make it work better! I can—"
Silco's hand catches her wrist, squeezing tight. It seems a threatening gesture, but they both know better. This is one of the few ways he permits his affection to show.
"Jinx." He fixes her with a stare. "It's perfect."
Just like that. The sheen fades from her eyes. She smiles, and her chin tips up, like a happy helium balloon.
Silco isn't gassing her up with empty words. He has no tolerance for failures. And Jinx? She is the exact opposite. His greatest achievement. He'd rescued her, remade her, released her—and she has returned the favor tenfold. As much as Zaun has given Silco a superstructure in his bleak travesty of a life, Jinx has given him even more.
Her brilliant bombs. Her talent with traps and tripwires. The riots of color that ooze from her artwork: primal horror poured into glow-paint. Her temperament that is so unlike his, more a spark in a cyclone of catastrophe than a boiling underground chasm that expresses itself in slow-seeping ruination. Her sense of humor, that is secretly like his: a game of cat and mouse with a flair for dramatic mind-fuckery. Her fingers, deft as a grease-monkey's, and yet spotlessly clean whenever she touches his eye-injector. Her laughter, which echoes with the profound eeriness of an asylum hallway, and yet sounds to Silco like the purest music.
They are matched set, counterpoise and counterpoint, apex and apogee, a defiance to every natural law of rightness. The world has grinded them down, chewed them to pieces and spit them back out. They have answered by sharpening their own teeth, and leaving the message writ in their enemy's blood.
"Ex cineribus resurgam," Silco murmurs.
'Don't start with the cinnamon buns again."
"It means—"
"I knooooow. You've told me like a bajillion times."
Jinx bounces up, snapping on the bedside lamp. The gold glow limns her nightwear: a black satin-style chemise—irregular in the knee-length hem and high-buttoned collar—that she'd chosen at the clearance warehouse by the docks. The same place where Babette's whores get their frippery. Yet to Silco's eye, Jinx's get-up is more childishly dolled-up than tartish.
Then again, she is still a child in his estimation. Never an inferior—he esteems her opinions above all others. He knows that children in the Undercity grow up fast as sneak-thieves; out of sight, out of mind. But Jinx will always be younger, and Silco's perception of her always shaped by the tunnel of six years as her guardian: braiding hair, bandaging scrapes, brushing away tears.
Her maturing sexuality rouses similar sentiments; like he is indulging the innocent coquetry of a girl spritzing on a fancy perfume.
"Hee!" Jinx does a little twirl, the chemise flaring around her calves. "Teacup!"
"You'll catch your death of a cold."
"In this hotbox? I'd melt alive first."
"Crack the window open. And pass my cigarettes."
Jinx leans her torso back—way back, a bloody circus-contortionist—and unlatches the window. In the same movement, she plucks the case resting on the sill.
Silco extends a patient hand. But instead of handing his smokes over, she snaps open the case. Playfully, she places a cigarette between her lips. Her blackberry gloss stains the filter. Silco's lip curls, mid-growl. But the winsome gap between her teeth reminds him everlastingly of the urchin he'd taken in. His temper dispels; he settles for a flat rebuke.
"It's too early for your games."
"I just want a puff."
"No."
"Geesh. You're one tall drink of sourpuss."
She lights up, setting the cherry aglow. Cupped hands, angled jaw, dipped eyelids—a perfect mimicry of his body-language. Pertly, she places the cigarette between his lips. The paper is flavored in stickysweet gloss; Silco inhales deeply to erase it. Yet the synchronicity of their exchange, lips to fingertips to lips, feels more purely tender than any act of debauched eroticism with his whores.
Sevika thinks she has him by the balls. She sees the surface of his and Jinx's intimacy: she reduces it to the lowest common denominator. Silco lets her believe it. It's the same with his network. They only see what Silco wants them to: the depths of his monstrosity. They can't picture him doting on a girl as shining as Jinx without the intent to devour her. Can't picture Jinx without his bloodied fingerprints all over her unspoiled body.
For Silco, it is anathema.
To lose Jinx is to quaff a gutful of poison; an act of mutually assured destruction. She is the one gift in his life that he has neither salvaged nor stolen. Accordingly, he does everything in his capacity to keep her safe. Keep her alive, as he does Zaun.
Close to the vest, right next to his black heart.
The night is at its zenith. In a few moments, Silco will dress and depart. Places to go, people to kill, etc. Catching up on his business as soon as his foot crosses the threshold helps to douse out the fires of disaster, or stoke new ones. Damage-control; damage-causation. No different from any other night.
But in the Undercity, life is short, and happiness shorter-lived. Silco does his utmost not to squander it. Each evening, he and Jinx share a routine: the Shimmer-shot, breakfast, and Jinx's hair-braiding.
Stubbing out the cigarette, he says, "Meet me in the kitchen."
"Can we have waffles?"
"Too much sugar. Eggs benedict."
"Blech! No fucking way!"
"Language." He smooths down the bed-tufts in his hair. "The protein will do you good."
"Not eggs benedict! It sounds like a stuffy weirdo you hired to run your books!"
Silco pinches out the stirrings of a smile, "A pizza omelet, then."
"Whoo-hoo."
She bounces out with her fist pumping at the air.
Silco hears her in the kitchen, light on her feet and making a mess. The clatter of cutlery is undercut by her off-key voice singing along to the slouchy oldies on the phonograph. Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear… Her tastes are patterned on his: an eclectic soundtrack of jazz, rock, punk. Undercity-bred agitators of the status quo. The kind who plant seeds and start riots.
Yet what thrums through Silco is Jinx's laughter. No sweeter sound on earth.
In the bathroom, he runs the shower as hot as it will go. The wall-mounted heater is old: it rattles but does its job. The space he shares with Jinx is well-appointed, but hardly luxurious. The majority of Silco's wealth is poured into his enterprise: a daily struggle to wrest Zaun out of bondage and into independence.
Except Piltover is a fancy whore with a mouthful of barbed teeth. She sucks you down and swallows all your lifeblood, then leaves you sprawled naked in the concrete. She dresses to the nines; Zaun must likewise dress to kill. There is value in cultivating a mystique.
Drying off, Silco goes to the closet. Designer suits, all layered in kevlar. They are tailored to serve seamlessly at a soignee Topside ball or at a balls-out Undercity battle. The older he gets, the slimmer the difference between the two becomes.
Dabbing on concealer, he barely glances at the mirror. His reflection is wrecked as always—a halved bust of Janus. To the right: unmarked austerity, the jaw and cheekbones starkly contoured. To the left: a study of scarred mathematics, the grooves of ruined flesh etched in as if with a compass. Shimmer keeps the worst atrophying at bay. He's thankful for that much.
A pristine profile is for men who don't exist on borrowed time.
In the kitchen, he whisks together Jinx's pizza-omelet with a practiced hand. Eggs, cheese, mushrooms, tomatoes. Bootlegged like his cigars, but worth the trouble. Bonemeal is all Silco grew up eating; he makes sure Jinx is nourished on something that lasts the distance.
They sit together at the table at right angles—Jinx chewing hungrily between sips of chocolate milk, while Silco shortens the pot of black coffee over the span of a half-bell. It is a scene replayed thousands of times: two years ago, four, six. Jinx as an eleven-year-old: the table barely up to her chest and scattered with her drawings, her eyes downcast and lips barely moving. Now she is seventeen and the table is up to her navel: she is engaged in an excited monologue about breaking into Xivic's territory yesterday, complete with wild hand-gestures and a ninety-second diversion into the configurations of tripwire traps and an anecdote about Fishbones, punctuated by whooshing sound-effects: ptowww, gerkkk, boooom.
Silco nods between sips of coffee. There is no sense in entering Jinx's conversational slipstreams once they're in motion. He's content simply to listen. At the window, the city is a cage of chaotic life. Below, the Drop is the same. But upstairs is his cage, a demarcation against the outside realm—clean and calm, yet ruled by a different pulsebeat of chaos.
Jinx: her lips parted to nibble jam-toast, her eyes glowing in a short-circuited semblance of happiness.
Nighttime fills the parlor with an acid green glow that spreads like glitter over everything. Freshly bathed and tooth-brushed, Jinx sits crosslegged on the rug, using his knees to support her spine, while Silco sits at the armchair and grooms her hair, before sheathing it into their hexnuts and their twisty bindings. Slowly and methodically, he smooths out the snarls—first with his fingers, then with a hairbrush.
While he works, Jinx fidgets pettishly in her usual fashion. Sometimes scribbling rude remarks on the late-night newspaper— Sun & Tower—sometimes doodling on the photos of councilors, sometimes reading out loud in an accent of caustic erudition identical to his, and yet lilting like the nursery rhyme of Humpty Dumpty.
"'Alarming experience of fair bathers attacked by octopus,'" she narrates, "'Experts fear a Kraken at large. Could it be the Priestess of Illoi?'"
"Doubtful."
"'River Pilt has reached a crisis point! Bloated with effluence from the factories, it has become a 'pestilential stream!' Three bodies fight over the subject of metropolitan drainage: the Metropolitan Board of Works, the Sewerage Commissioners, and that ancient body, the Council.'"
"Turn 'em out, cockchafers all three."
Jinx stifles a guffaw. "Language."
"Call a spade a spade, and a Piltie a Piltie." He untangles a stubborn knot in her hair. "Flip to the business section."
"Ugggghh. Boring!"
"We've muscled in on a trading company. Now it's a waiting game. Either we drive its business to bankruptcy, or its owner to suicide."
"Any explosions?"
"Not this time."
"Double-boring!"
He bids her to check regardless. She does—good news. One dead owner, and more territory to expand into.
Pleased, Silco hums as he brushes out Jinx's hair. I'll make me a posy of hyssop, no other I can touch. Her locks are cool and brilliantly glossy in his palms. Precious pleasures. They seize his mind with a rare inertia that is stronger than Shimmer. That all the world may plainly see I love one flower too much.
Sometimes when he is with Jinx like this, so close, he wonders: did Vander feel this way with Violet? The profound peace, the ever-renewing pride? Other times his curiosity is eclipsed by jealousy—Vander raised Jinx as a daughter, yet he'd never recognized her potential as Silco does. He'd never cared to nurture her talents, instead shining all his attention on Violet, inheritor of his thick skull and flatiron fists. Then he thinks of Violet, and the jealousy distorts into a deep irrational hatred.
Even beyond the grave, she sucker-punches Jinx. She holds the power—of bonds, and betrayal, and blood—that Silco can't touch. She is the core of his girl's throbbing tumor, the trauma that still wakes her in the middle of the day with her body twisted into howling-odd shapes and her throat ragged with torn-out screams. Vi is her sister. The label encompasses a world of love and grief and joy and regret. Whereas Silco? He has only the dust and bones of his dead ghosts.
He has only Jinx.
Gently, he curls his palm across her nape. Squeezes until she ripples on a melodic giggle.
"Tickles!"
"All finished."
Jinx smooths a hand over her sleek braids, slinging them over her shoulder with a giddy coo to admire the handiwork. Then she twists around to grin at him, before climbing up and onto his knee. Other creatures, Silco would never permit so close. Other women would flinch beneath their façade of coyness. Other men would be rigid as corpses and as damnably silent.
Jinx nestles against him as sleekly as a cat. Her forehead, hot and a little moist, rests against his own. Her breath smells of toothpaste; her neck is scented with a dab of his bergamot cologne. Silco settles his arm around her shoulders and squeezes. They laze together in the shady parlor. Beyond them, the balcony is a portal to the Undercity's garishly-lit skyline, the smog tinting their skins with a faint greenish hue.
Silco watches the vista in silence. He is content to be near it, and near Jinx. To feel the heat of her body and the drumbeat of her heart. To imprint in his mind the sensation of homeness that he has forfeited by tallying each black mark on his soul, with ruthlessness and no regret, because he is ready to do what must be done. Fight for his cause, and die for it.
He will die—sooner rather than later—by a stray bullet or a Shimmer overdose or mouth-cancer or toxic poisoning or the hundreds of ways that took the rest. He will die in infamy, and go down in blackness.
But not before Zaun is free. His gift to Jinx. A legacy that transcends his own limitations.
"What'cha thinking?" Jinx asks quietly.
The stress lines in her voice signal concern. Silco recognizes each cadence; like a seafarer, he has taught himself to read the shifting horizon of her psyche, to know what presages a squall or a thunderstorm. The same way Jinx has learnt to read his silences as seismic tremors, and anticipate the underwater collapse or the tsunami.
Such a pair they are; each darkly mirroring the other.
With equal quietness, Silco says, "I'm thinking—this may sound crazy—about Zaun."
"Yep. Crazy as a crack-doused cockroach dipped in cake batter."
"I am thinking about the future."
"Whose future?"
"Ours. Yours and mine. Zaun's." His frown doesn't drop, but deepens. "You know this is a dangerous path we tread."
"Really? It's been a cakewalk so far."
"I am serious."
"Serious as a heart-attack?"
"Or whatever else takes me out."
The atmosphere runs thick with silence. Silence like a headshot.
Jinx whispers, "Is something—?"
"Hm?"
"Is s-s-something wrong?" Her mercurial eyes gone glassy. "Are you sick?"
"No, child."
"Then why—?"
He takes her hand. It doesn't tremble in his—it never has. But he feels the thrum of her pulse. A tripwire beneath the surface: doom, dread. He folds their fingers together, squeezing, though not in comfort. There is a difference between living in wretchedness versus living in truth.
Silco has always spared Jinx the former. The latter? Look it squarely in the eye with your fists cocked. Pulverize it into submission. He's taught her that much.
"Listen to me, Jinx," he says. "You are my own. I do everything I can for you. For you, and the Undercity. But a time will come when I cannot."
"Silco—"
"When it happens, you must swear to me. Stay strong. Be what Zaun needs, and what our enemies fear."
"You're not d-dying!" Her humor verges on low-bubbling hysteria. "The Undercity's barely positive you're even alive! I hear what they say on the streets. Ice-water pumping in those veins."
Just Shimmer, my love.
Silco clamps down on the bitter riposte. An installment plan of self-sustainment is better than no plan at all.
"Everyone passes," he says. "Sometimes in quarter-inches. Sometimes in one fell swoop."
"Not you! You're always there. You listen to me and... you keep me... keep me from being lost."
"You will learn to keep yourself steady. You must, if the Undercity is to be led by you."
"They don't want me!"
"They will if you blaze a legacy into their lives. Something that burns Piltover to the ground." His rage at Topside is burrowed as deep as his desire for Jinx to triumph: he feels it behind his ribcage, an epithet of triggered heartbeats. "You won't start from ground zero. You'll inherit everything I leave behind. Use it to throw off the weight of the past. Piltover's over Zaun. Your family's over you. Be merciless, and chart your own direction."
"Don't—please—"
"It is the only thing I ask, child. My living wish. My dying one."
Jinx jerks as if backhanded, tears steaking her cheeks. "No! No no no no—"
Her distress pulls a reflexive tightness through his own chest. Her trembling shape in his arms, her lungs expanding and contracting with a rapidity that presages hyperventilation. The trauma-tumor in her mind throbbing into full-blown agony.
The fingerprints at Silco's neck throb to the same rhythm. Memory of the crying girl in the rain; the young man thrashing in bloodied waters. Thrown to wolves, fed to sharks—a bite of meat flung by a divine hand. Out of grace, and into the endless dark.
Yet from the ashes, Silco thinks, we rise.
He encircles Jinx closer. His palm curls across her nape, thumb stroking back and forth across the hypnotizing spot where downy hair grades into hot skin. She jitters in place. No combustion. But the raw chemical terror of her scent is tangible. On others, Silco rouses it for pure sadism. With words, or without. Their suffering is a treat; he consumes it with relish.
On Jinx, it sends a chill through him. Always has.
He remembers one time Jinx was thirteen. They were caught in a turf-war with the Slickjaws. Silce had demanded frags by the ten-dozen; the bigger the better. Except Jinx had miscalculated the chemical mix. Her entire room blowing out redly like a blood vessel. Jinx flung against the wall like a ragdoll. The edges of her silhouette smoking, her small body miraculously whole. He remembers her sobs, filling the air in a garbled derangement—I screwed up, oh shit, oh god, sorry, I'm so sorry, jinx, just a stupid useless jinx.
Silco had scooped her up with the same palpable panic. Taken the stairs three at a time, shouting to rouse his lackeys, hauling her in double-time to the med-bay.
All signals of weakness in his world: a bullseye, a blind spot. All of which he knew and didn't give a fuck about.
Hush, my lovely. They can't hurt you now.
He struggles with the memory, jaw clenching against remembered pain. In his arms, Jinx curls up wordlessly. Her shaking has subsided to imperceptible tremors; she breathes in little hiccups. Silco stares with a throttled-back tenderness at her delicate face, a smooth map hiding fault-lines of old scars. But her skin is unbloodied and her eyes are bright and alive.
For tonight, it is enough.
"I know it upsets you," he says, hardly a whisper. "But we must plan ahead. Always."
Jinx nods, minimally.
"Will you promise me? To stay strong?"
Jinx breathes, and swallows.
"Please."
Another nod, sharper than the first.
"There's my girl. My Jinx."
She shivers. It isn't resistance but relief. The sound of her own name; Silco knows its sway. As if hearing it enough times, from his mouth or the mouths of their enemies, will help her inhabit it. As if reinvention can erase the world of inner-torment, and replace it with something that terrorizes the world.
Silco gave her that, didn't he? Bombshells and braids, bullets and bruises. New scars to supplant the old. New love, deeper than Vander's, and worse than Vi's. Worse.
He remembers another time. Jinx was fifteen. She'd been building military-grade frags. Silco demanded them by the truckload; his forces were massing an invasion of northside. They were both underslept and overstymmied. Silco burning fumes at his desk; Jinx pouring fumes inside her subterranean workshop. Habitually, he'd descended by nightfall to check on her.
And he'd smelled it—blood and burnt flesh.
Bursting in, he'd found Jinx in a knotted net of faulty detonating wires. Scorched, sliced and barely-breathing. He remembers shouting for Sevika, stationed like a gargoyle outside the cave. Remembers clawing his fingers under those sizzling knots, so fucking deep in her skin. Blood blurring her features, spooling from her lips. His nails cracking and fingers blistering as he tore through the red-hot webbing. Jinx's lips twitching on mangled words—sorry, so sorry, I fucked it up, I jinxed it, a mistake, I made a mistake.
The ghostly fingerprints on Silco's throat had tightened in shared agony. Freeing her from the death-tangle, he'd dragged her into his arms. His whisper a strangled wildness in her ear.
Hush, my lovely. They can't hurt you now.
He remembers yet another time. Another, and another, and another. Accidents—he calls them. They both know better. In every battle, Silco lashes out with an inexorable precision; find the weakness, and rout it out. Here, the truth withholds itself from the sparring ring of his psyche. He shadow-boxes with it, retreats, again and again. It is his sorest wound.
He strokes a palm along Jinx's skull, cradling its shape. The calluses on his fingertips catch in her hair.
"Jinx, if you—"
"Hnn?"
"If you never built me a bomb ever again, I'd never blame you."
Jinx's breath hitches, blue eyes snapping to his. "Liar."
"I mean it."
Does he? He is skilled at blending truth with bullshit. He manipulates with a messianic expertise: a silver tongue ringed in the sharpest teeth. But Jinx is different. For her, he feels a bone-deep pull towards honesty, a needfulness that is natural, in that nature perpetually twists its creations into unnatural shapes.
The words taste like a tepid nod to convention. A play at the morality he's never possessed. Yet they are true, because he wants to know. Jinx's heart, on her own terms.
"It makes me happy that we share a dream," he says. "But you make me happy on your own."
Jinx's face is tearstained. But inside her eyes, the electric fire spins clockwise, a thousand calculations snipping off between synaptic-seconds. "Suppose I took up baking?"
"Certainly."
After the Drop is thoroughly fireproofed.
"Painting?"
"Delightful."
The club's décor could use a do-over.
"Stripping?"
"I would …compromise."
No lap-dances for anyone. Except maybe Sevika.
"Suppose I left?"
She stretches out across his lap, knees on either side of him, a hot blanket that Silco doesn't dare peel off. Her eyes hold a renewed sheen of tears. But her smile is a bitter-edged mockery. She already knows his answer—the spoken, and unspoken.
Silco acknowledges her game with the barest wince. "I want you to have better, child."
"Better?"
"Better than Topside's leavings." The hiss of hatred darts through his voice: inverse of his love. "To know a good night's sleep. To have clean air. To be happy."
"I… I know that."
"So? Tell me."
Jinx rubs the heel of her hand across her pink-rimmed eyelids, then flips back a strand of blue hair. The electricity fizzes out; she seems subdued and brooding. Then her palms glide across his coat, resting at the knot of his cravat. Ten fingertips—blue and pink—encircling his throat.
It isn't a threatening touch. Yet Silco feels the ever-present buzz of tension. His body a redline of latent adrenaline.
"You can't keep a wild element," Sevika had warned. "They eat themselves alive, or kill their keepers."
Jinx is capable of killing him. There is no question of that. He's fashioned her in his likeness: she strikes hard and shows no mercy. If he gets in the way of what she desires, he will be gunned down. Silco has long made peace with that. It neither frightens him, nor seems a failure in his modus operandi of otherwise bloodthirsty bottom-lines.
Every parent teaches their child to live better. Bite harder. Every predator passes on the deadliest traits so that their offspring ascends the evolutionary ladder.
Nature abhors a vacuum. So does the Undercity. You either make your mark—or go extinct.
Zaun is Silco's mark. His heirloom. What will Jinx's be?
"After," Jinx says.
Silco's good eye slides across hers.
"After we have Zaun. After we're free. Then—"
"Then?"
Her lips touch the point of his larynx, a kiss of warm air on his throat.
Silco focuses on her with a contained wariness. His good blue eye is curious, the red one a burning pool with Jinx's face glossed across its surface. The kiss seems less a non-sequitur than a stalemate. Her expression is the same—an uncanny lightness in her smile, but her eyes heavy-lidded. Blowing mist on the glass; scattering the spores of obfuscation.
Tricks Silco has taught her—now a ploy to shut him up.
"Jinx—"
"Ex cineribus resurgam."
"What?"
She scoots off his lap. For a moment her face is a stranger's, stained with a darkness that eclipses Silco's own. Then like a carousel in motion, her mood spins back up, restoring her to the weird, wild, willful girl he has always known. Her smile is pure sparkle, and purely for him.
"I wanna show you something."
"Show me what?"
She grabs his hand in both her own and tugs.
Silco lets himself be hauled to his feet. Lets her guide him to the balcony. A ten-digit code disarms the lock. Jinx pulls the sliding door open, and steps out into the smoky night. Silco follows her. The air holds no freshness. The city is a stewpot, saturated with heat, smoke bubbling from the hundreds of grates and chimneys. Yet its pulse is purely hypnotic.
Silco stands at the railing and rests his hands on the corroded iron. Tips his chin, and breathes it in—his empire of fire and fury.
To the west: the Commercia Fantastica, a meandering starfish of neon and pink-noise. To the east: the steel-packed strip of Factorywood, belching flames and scattering embers. Since his takeover, every commercial hub has expanded crazily. The city has everything it needs to be an enterprise: factories, fisheries, harbors, warehouses, laboratories, nightclubs, dine-ins, oxygen bars, arcades, bazaars. And more powerfully: its massive unregulated free market, the doors flung open by Shimmer's innovation.
Zaunites are infused with the same spirit of cutthroat independence. They strive for their slice of the pie; when denied, they fight for it tooth and claw.
And for claiming our due, Topside dubs us monsters.
Nobody can love a monster, but they can exploit it. That is what Piltover keeps doing. Exploiting the Undercity, while poisoning it to its marrow. To stay here is to let that poison suffuse you: a monstrosity shot through to the soul. But every monster outgrows its enclosure. It rises from the depths, teeth-gnashing and empty-bellied for its fair share of the spoils. For its pound of flesh.
Soon.
They have the manpower—blood. They have the Shimmer—drugs. They have the connections—bonemeal.
And a shot of chaos to Jinx it up.
He glances over at Jinx. Her features, contoured in neon, are as animated as the cityscape. The signboards flicker across her skin in multicolored tattoos. But that is nothing to the interior glow of her eyes.
Softly, Silco asks, "What did you want to show me?"
"Did you forget?"
"Forget what?"
"My surprise."
Silco absorbs this with a glint in his half-lidded eye. Could it be her magnum opus?
"Any explosions?"
"You'll see."
Jinx aims two fingers of her right hand like a gun-barrel. She fires off into the sky: a solid wall of smog.
Silco stares. For one moment, then another. Nothing happens. Moist air touches his tongue; his lips part to speak. Then—
Oh.
It starts as the tiniest pinpricks in the blackness. Bright as stars, except the sky is too chocked-up with gases. These are something else. Something special. Specks of movement, green and glowing. They accumulate slowly, floating in the air currents. First a dozen, then fifty, then a hundred. They spiral in a slow-motion swarm, the loveliest neon lightshow. Gathering mass as they come closer, from incandescent grains of sand to flickering glowballs.
One flutters onto Silco's shoulder. He regards the gossamer wings. Its body glows the softest green.
"Firelights."
Jinx shakes her head.
"What then?"
"Look closer."
He does. The insect is different from a Firelight—fuller and heavier. Its wings hold a copper-cast sheen, legs knitting like tiny needles into the fabric of his suit. He glimpses the streaks of glow-paint on its carapace. A well-known motif: Jinx's monkey. Comprehension crashes—these are not real Firelights. They are bombs. The balcony is scattered with dozens of them. Each one a weapon in motion. In disguise, in plain sight.
Stunned, Silco picks the flyer off his shoulder. It rests in his cupped palms: wings thrumming with a luminous heartbeat.
He meets Jinx's eyes, and they twinkle with the same intensity. The entire span of her body twists: antsiness, anticipation. Hands loosely clasped behind her back.
"Neato, huh?"
Silco stares.
"Took a while to find the proper dye. It's tough to match the shade of a real Firelight. They're different from lime green, or candy green, or sludge green. They're like—I dunno. Spits of greeny fire. In a soft sorta way."
Indeed, Silco thinks.
He stares up at the sweep of flyers. A lunatic panorama of glittering, unforgiving, unforgettable green.
Silence lapses between him and Jinx. A silence he is usually quick to fill with praise or a well-phrased critique. Jinx thrives on feedback; his words have the power to perk her up like a whirligig toy, or deflate her like a wrecked souffle. She doesn't deviate from the familiar script now: hopping from foot to foot, her mouth a plum-dark pout, her eyes big as a magpie's.
"Do you like 'em?" she says, with directness.
Silco doesn't answer at once. He regards the contraption in his palms, gaze downcast.
"How many—?"
"Hnnn?"
"How many did you make?"
"Oh, I dunno." She finesses a blue strand of hair around her fingertip. "Five hundred. Give or take a faulty batch."
"How long did it take you?"
"Half a month."
"So fast."
"It's easy once the aerodynamics are down." She steps closer, trying for casualness, and failing. "Don't you like them?"
Silco says nothing.
He extends his palms toward Jinx, who raises her own to catch the flyer as it skitters down his fingers and onto hers. They trade glances—hers expectant, his enigmatic—before she sets the flyer on the railing, where its gauzy wings fan outward, a flickerbeat of gears.
Then it takes off.
Silco watches it zigzag through the cityscape to vanish at the horizon. The spot where the Undercity stretches out to meet the river Pilt, sparkling darkly in the twilight. The spot where Piltover rises into view, its golden towers like the points of a hundred crowns. The city of progress; the city of pride before a fall.
All ashes soon.
In Silco's mind, a dozen voices drift up, ghostlike. They stir in their wake emotions he cannot name.
If you never built me a bomb ever again…
As long as you have Zaun in your sightlines …
Liar…
Jinx skips over to stand within inches. Fingers tugging his sleeve like it's a tether to sanity.
"Say something! If you don't like 'em—"
Silco snatches her into his arms, and kisses her—a rough bullseye on her forehead.
Jinx's uncertainty dissolves. In its place is a shock that makes her look Powderishly lost. He's never embraced her so fiercely—not since the night they'd first met, Vander's corpse a foot away and flames dancing everywhere. He's certainly never kissed her—his mouth is a maw to tear and trick and terrorize, and he keeps it far away from her, figuratively and literally.
But now he holds her tight, his lips motionless on her brow, for a long time. Long enough for her exhale a jittering breath. Long enough for her arms to slide around him, fingers knitting between his shoulderblades. Long enough to relish the cool silkiness of her hair against his scarred cheek, and breathe in her windblown scent.
Long enough—the nick of time—to surface into his epiphany as out of bloody water, the shape of her a safeguard against drowning.
Epiphany.
Big word. The world is full of them, like loyalty, or destiny. None are worth a damn. Destiny is rabid bloodhound. It runs circles around you, until you pulverize its skull beneath your boot-heel. Loyalty is worse. A dead dog that you feed every ounce of your life into, with nothing but rot as your reward.
Jinx is different.
A creature of pure rarity, shot through the core with it. Nothing about her is what he expects. She comes and goes as she chooses. She bites who she likes and blows up who she hates. Her life holds no universal shape, no unifying motive. Yet she holds inside of herself something wondrous—like fresh air—something that sustains Silco in a way that words can't label. What words he does give her aren't enough. They feel like a poor man's poem, or a riddle left unsolved.
(Perfect, perfect, perfect.)
"The bombs," he whispers into her hair, "are brilliant. But—"
"But what?"
"If you never built me another—"
"Quit that, would ya! Just gimme a deadline."
Silco takes deep breath, holding it for a moment with the thousands of words left unspoken, because saying them means he will not fully be himself anymore, that his years of coldness and expedience will be for nothing. Zaun will be for nothing, and Jinx will have less than that. Less, even, than he did.
So he sets his jaw, and gathers her in tighter.
"How soon can you finish the next batch?"
Jinx nuzzles into his chest. "Gimme a fortnight."
"Take a month. Take two."
"How many do you want?"
"A modest mass."
"A bajillion, huh? Or in technical terms—"
"A shitload."
They say it at the same time. A pair of matched smiles slink across their faces.
Jinx.
Below, the Undercity throbs in technicolor. The brightly slinking shapes of cars, the neon spectrum of signboards and the glowing thumbprints of windows. Every so often a noise bubbles up: skirls of music, the crack of a gunshot, a crazed holler of laughter. A city with no equilibrium, flaunting its costume of dizzying gaudiness, its morals tilting on a sneaky gyre of self-interest.
And yet beautiful despite that. Maybe more beautiful because of it.
We deserve more than a future as Piltover's piss-pot.
We deserve—
Jinx, safekeeper of his secrets, says, "We'll show them. Cross our hearts."
"Watch them die."
"Blast a million fireballs in their eyes."
Silco draws in a savoring breath. "Their city will be our tinder."
A dark dream for dark times. But warmth spreads where they touch, and lingers when Silco lets Jinx go. Together, they lean side-by-side against the balcony. The firelights spin skyward in a green-lit vortex. Silco watches them scatter through the two cities. One struggling to birth itself like a phoenix, the other on the cusp of biting the dust.
It's just a matter of time. Nature abhors a vacuum.
I like to keep pre-beta-read drafts full of meta tidbits for my fics. I have one for this story too. Let me know if y'all are interested, and I'll post it as like a fun DVD cut type thing, for anyone who wants to hear me ramble and rant about the craziness of these characters!
Reviews are much loved! :)