Work Text:
Jinx is a bad Zaunite. Bad not to the bone but bad to the brain, she'll say, the closest she brings herself to apology. So forgive her this: sometimes she dreams of Piltover.
Her brain doesn't spoil her with the comforting memories, like the time she unzipped the Ecliptic Vaults, coin spilling into the storm-drains like bile from Jericho's catch. The recent loop is all Powder. She'd been brought to see the far side of topside at seven or eight; revolutionary fervor is best caught early. Vi had at first leaned only her shoulders on the bathysphere cage as they rose, a flying buttress of a girl, and then yawned and fiddled with Powder's hairclips: snicker-snack, snicker-snack, to the rhythm of the lift cable. You could almost believe Vi hadn't begged Vander for a month for just a peek's permission.
"It's okay to say it's safe," Powder muttered. And that you're angry about it. Vi, faux-idle, clearly thought Piltover a place where her usual knock'em up postures would do her no good.
"Stay close," Vi said, as the door slid open. "What'd I teach you about assumptions?"
Powder's first glimpse floored her. Vi had to scoop her up before she was trampled. Jinx's mind can now make out the whirl of new fashions, new colors of stone. Buildings like teeth, if the teeth had dentists. The disorienting dearth of indolic smells and coughing.
But the greatest assault—what strikes Jinx, even now, with how readily she'd kill to be so consummate, so unstoppable; struck Powder, even then, with her sister's care as a blanket between her and her own rapacity—was the sunlight.
The sunlight came not in the dribbles that fed down Old Hungry, in furtive spill down the great cliff, but everywhere, the sky so blue and flood-lit she hadn't thought, for a moment, to look for the star. Kids basked in their parents' smiles, cakes basked on the balconies. And behind them she saw the sheer spendthrift size of the windowpanes welcoming the Pilties' sun. Not for them the chemlamps of the undercity, light stained and fractured by the cellar windows or the neon tubes pinched like sausage links around the pipework, light volleyed between films of oil, muck, and sweat until the dregs could only loiter haplessly in the air like voyeurs turfed out to the streets. Not for them the shadows cast in a thousand directions, or the haze that ate all shadows up.
Powder pressed her face into Vi's freshly bleached shirt so Vi's arms would eclipse her. Vi had let her hide, then.
Well! Don't say Jinx doesn't learn. Nowanights she keeps no filter between herself and the raw fucking deal of the world. Even in her sleep she understands that some things mix like potassium and water: the over and the undercity, Jinx and Powder, Powder and Miss Not So Close After All. Jinx and Miss Ashes to Ashes—or fish gut to fish gut, considering her old dinner haunt and where the undercity usually takes its bodies.
The contaminant in Jinx's chest. The act of naming its roots.
"Have them extracted," Silco tells the ceiling, when Jinx can no longer hide them, and she says, "What's the rush, old man?"
He doesn't look worried. Yet. In his lap only his fingertips are touching: a man uncommitted to a prayer. That's good; only so much stress fits safely in a room. The flowers have been forcing past her esophagus, unhurriedly but inexorably, pushing out of their old container as yeast pushes a loaf out of the pan.
By the time Jinx lobs the flower she's saved at him it's only a wet and rather sad clump of petal—oh, pretty petal of a mouth, she remembers, from a man seconds before she zapped out his larynx, and she has ground the clump beneath her hand's heel for good measure—but Silco catches it as graciously as any wedding bouquet. He straightens in his chair. In his hand the bloody thing unfurls like a secret.
He says, "The daturas are cousins to shimmer-flower—" C'mon, come on, trust your liquid ordnance specialist to know. Or the girl who's been tasting each flower as it passes her tongue. "More than a little dangerous. She's dead, Jinx. It's a matter of time. We've already suffered more than enough to pay any toll the river demands of us."
"How was your shank and yank?" Jinx asks, although she knows that, too. How it went, if not how it felt. How Silco handled this particular gift/curse is a public pillar of his mythos. Still more drowned than alive, his eye self-anointed on a dead sawbones' table, he asked a butcher with drug-steadied hands and a hot knife to cut his flowers out at the first cough.
"Easier than I ever imagined," he says, quietly. "She peeled it right out from the roots."
But where are Jinx's roots. Yes, when she lies down and sucks her ribs in, she can practically see the tendrils, yellow as bone, aerated secondhand in her lungs. But that's not where the flowers are from. That's just where they live.
She trails her fingers through his ashtray, licks her nails. Replaces the vegetal taste of one slow death with another. "I'll think on it," Jinx says. "How's that Ionian meditation thing going for Sevika? You think it's working out any better than punching out her feelings?"
When he doesn't immediately push further, she zips out of his office into the evening. She's not a waiter. In a way, Silco isn't, either; sometimes a man can amputate all the dangly bits between his heart and his throat and it turns out just fine, apparently. Good for him, not being sentimental. Let Silco be the new maypole around which Zaun can dance.
But Jinx isn't a self-pistoning engine of a soul; before—before she was eleven, and everything went to hell in a hand-cranked elevator—she was a dilettante at best in the project of the undercity. She wanted approval, admiration, a pillow for her head, a hand rumpling her hair. At the very least Sevika hates her for it. And memories fizzle, except the ones that become ghosts just to annoy you. If she will fight for a cause it'll have to keep itself burning: she chose the chasm beneath her workshop propeller for the euphoria of walking the ledge and never falling. As Silco might describe it: fires must regularly leapfrog the tenement walls of her heart.
Or maybe a thornapple needs to pierce through.
"I'm not keeping them just for you," she says, on the front step, to the body hovering in the corner of her eye.
She could draw her arm back and clock it, this waxwork of flower fertilizer, but it's bad enough how real her brain has already made Vi without Jinx touching the ghost. Or expecting a ghost to deform and bounce like flesh. Expecting a ghost to return touch where it has been touched.
"I didn't tell him everything, either," Jinx says. "Ugh, too much faith in family. Look how that goes."
Her hand opens and closes on the cloth wrapping her real blooms. They're almost too bright to look at, even squashed and wilting: finest, rarest shimmer-flower, when even the weaker species have been harvested nearly to extinction in the caves. Flowers so adapted to polluted water that in cleaner rivers they drown. Inlets of iridescence squirm along the petals like slugs.
Silco sends someone to tail her, of course. It'd be an insult if he didn't, although she's frankly offended by who he does. Lock can break a brick wall with his numbskull, assuming the wall stands still; but good luck swatting a fly, and even Piltover's favorite yordle could out-shimmy him. She swipes a little scrap of metal out of the gutter and lets him heave closer. There—she plinks the metal like a ferry-coin through Lock's open lips, and there. Look at her go.
When Powder was ten, Vi helped her draw two maps of the undercity. One for the routes Vi herself could take, and one for the routes she could entrust to her kid sister. Oh, yeah yeah, It's not about trust, Powder—whatever the five years of growth between them mean in a brawl on the ground, they do mean at least as much vaulting rooftop to rooftop, however thick the air.
Jinx is improving beyond Vi's routes. The map she inherited has become barely a souvenir. If you can't drop or broad jump five times your height and roll out without a permanent shoulder injury, the new industrialists of Zaun will be delighted to sell you a solution. The memory lanes of Zaun take longer to run than the real Lanes, it turns out, when you can leap thoughtlessly between its spiderleg bridges like cholera.
Thirty seconds and she loses Lock on the other side of a vent he'll never fit through, unless introduced first to a trash compactor. A few minutes up, or mostly up. Everywhere is a ladder: the stems of Jinx's flowers are piping straight fearlessness through the factory of her own body. She jumps boughs of argon tubing before they can shatter, swings between the lamp cages tacked around them like bounties. Some new baron has been proud enough to install a septic line and disguise it as artwork; nice of him to put up such a clear signal to climb it.
And now all the undercity under her. The ghost walks right up to her on the roof, shrugs. Jinx has been given compliments and insults both on how she moves—feline, or if really showing off, pantherine—which she didn't understand until she sees how Vi doesn't move: all that solidity, how the ghost has to roughly pump its right shoulder before it squares itself, like Zapper's lock sliding back as Jinx reloads it.
Shit, the ghost says. I forgot how happy we were just to be reckless.
They're facing the fish-scale glitter of the sea, near where the river empties into it. Jinx squints down. There's a familiar ledge below to point at. "Do you remember?" The girls who would line up there to dive over and over, like gannets, into the sea. "You didn't stop me. A chance to be a good sister, and you blew it."
Of course Powder had been warned. Of course she didn't listen. Trained with habits from a different terrain, she flung herself toward the water the same way Vi had taught her to jump onto concrete. With her knees bent and her toes fanned out, the water whipped blood from the back of her thighs and wrenched her hips so badly Vi had to carry her and her soda all the way home.
Well, she won't be doing it again. Nor will the mermaid gang. It's easier—and even safer, if you count the risks in the minute of achievement and not in the following decade—to reach that rush these days with shimmer.
I'm sorry, Pow-Pow, says the ghost.
"Not Powder," Jinx says. "Say sorry to me."
She sniffles: that's just pollen spiking up her nose. That's Vi's fault too, Jinx thinks. The fury and the fucking flowers combine to stopper her words in her chest. And then she's sitting with half her thighs dangling over the edge, and the ghost has wrapped its hands around her throat. Come back!
"Ha, haha," Jinx chokes out. "Will you?"
The light-haze-smudge that makes up the ghost's skin is paling and cracking at its edges, as if some vital sap is being drained out of it. All that's really whole in the ghost now is her face, the horror and the desperation in her collapsing eyes. Love, courtesy of the gift of the river: a shortcut to seeing what you had before it's going and gone.
Sometimes the purest expression of a thing is in extremity. Vander, sometime in the nights he snatched away from the work of keeping the undercity from boiling, said a language finds its exaltation in its poetry. Maybe Zaun finds its exaltation in Silco. Maybe Jinx—the most Jinx-ish, the most purely she can be Jinx—is in the holes she makes in the world. Along the way up Jinx passed the oldest apothecary of the Entresol. The corpses have been cleaned up; the crater of asbestos and rebar has not.
A ghost is splintering like a post-grenade building, like a post-grenade body.
A coughing fit rocks Jinx back. There's nowhere else to go. The ghost's head, its legs, its torso block all the space before her. You come back, Jinx would scream, but her lungs are wasting all their air on blooming. She is choking on her own votive offering.
Unwilling to wait, she shoves her fingers into her tonsils. The flower tears out blazing against the dark, like eating fire in reverse. Add it to her existing collection and they're more than a mouthful to chew, but Jinx has always been ravenous for more than she can contain. Love makes for a very quick drug. Her eye sockets seem to burrow backwards in her brain, and she itches: like a need to give someone an injury. Most acutely herself, but an enforcer or a city would suffice.
And then Jinx's head whips around and Vi's there again—the pinions of her hair, the roll of her shoulder readying it for Jinx to lean on; the intensity that brought her to fight and fight and die fighting lines her eyes like kohl. Vi's head swivels, even, to follow the last horns of the night shrieking off the river barges below.
"Vi," Jinx says. This Vi says nothing. Maybe she'd rather not look at the smoking ruin of Powder that Jinx has become; maybe she's looking for a firebrand, and not just a fire. Maybe it's not enough just to know that Jinx has yet to back down from the question posed by every flower as it leaves her mouth. But at least Vi's living: living in the hothouse of Jinx's heart, for as long as Jinx lives.