Chapter Text
The thing is that, ethically, Ekko supports her coming here.
For years, Piltover and Zaun have been segregated, and for years, Zaun has been crushed under Piltover’s boot. It’s an apartheid, plain and simple. Laws form catch-22s along with half of the policies in Zaun - you can’t go to Piltover schools as a Zaunite but there are no Zaun schools, you need papers and documents to get a proper job but they cost money and nobody can afford them in Zaun so they don’t have jobs so they can’t get documents to get a job, etc. The blockades, year-long times when the heavily-policed entrances to the Undercity get more heavily policed, are tools specifically to wipe Zaunites out, destroying around 20% of the population because they no longer allow in any food, medicine, or water while not letting anyone out, forcing the vulnerable to die and everyone else to make impossible choices and turn to truly horrible things to survive.
Ekko and the Firelights have barely changed that, but they’ve changed something. Maybe it’s small in the grand scheme of things, maybe it’s pathetic, but smuggling in food, medicine, and water, producing medicines that are illegal for Zaunites to access themselves, setting up small schools to teach kids at least the basics, creating false papers for people to get work… it’s not much. It’s barely anything. It’s not releasing the grip Piltover has on them, just prying the fingers a tiny bit looser.
He had to be practically forced to attend the Academy when it got offered to him. Somehow, Heimerdinger and Jayce - whom he’d only met because Heimerdinger went to the Undercity just because he could when Ekko happened to be trying to head back home to the Sanctuary after a pretty ugly fight and Heimerdinger had followed him home like a cat, then had somehow roped Jayce in to come down as well - vouched for him, Ekko took the entrance and equivalency tests, and he was asked to come to the Academy to get his PhD. He’d gone to refuse on principle, but Scar had borderline said ‘you accept because this is the first time they’re offering a Zaunite a chance without being expected to cut off Zaun and lose their citizenship, this is a massive civil rights issue, you are going to go no matter how you feel.’
So… yeah. Ekko’s eighteen years old, the first Undercity kid to attend the Academy without having to be sponsored and taken in as a Piltover citizen, studying for a PhD in engineering, and is both a former revolutionary leader of the Firelights and a new record-setter just by showing up here.
Ekko knows, on every layer, all the way down to his bones, that he has to be here. That it matters for Zaunites to be here. That he has to pave a path in every way he can, in every area he can. It’s why he’s fighting so hard to do perfectly, to keep up appearances, to be proof that Zaunites belong here, that being Undercity isn’t a moral issue (let alone a moral failing) and that they’re just… normal.
Ethically, he’s so unbelievably thrilled that he did indeed set a precedent and another Zaunite is here (especially without being asked to rescind everything about themselves that makes them Zaunite and renounce their citizenship.) Ethically, he knows that this is just as much progress, another Zaunite (and this time a girl.)
Having said that, as a teenage boy and a human being with emotions, he’s so, so pissed-off that she’s here.
Ekko can’t help but glower at the front of the classroom where Jinx is excitedly chattering to Professor Heimerdinger like she belongs here instead of in solitary confinement or at the bottom of the river, like she hasn’t spent the past eight years helping Silco establish the biggest criminal network to ever exist in Zaun and destroying any chances for things to change while she kept the Chembarons in charge.
Politically, ethically, logically, whatever, Ekko knows it’s genuinely amazing. The fact that Jinx got in one semester after him shows that the door isn’t closed, that he wasn’t a fluke, that him being here has actually changed something. However, having said that, she doesn’t belong here. Like he said, if there was any justice, she’d be on a life sentence or dead.
Not in his godsdamn physics class.
What pisses him off, other than that, is that she looks so happy to be here.
Jinx is practically beaming, all wide blue eyes and a big, gap-toothed smile as she looks around. She’s not dressed fancy, hair in one long fishtail braid and wearing so many layers of sweaters over her baggy cargo pants that she looks like she attempted to roll around in blankets to look like a marshmallow and called it a day.
She looks less colorful than he remembers. Maybe it’s the fact that all his memories of her are filtered through the lens of childhood or adrenaline, but he remembers her hair being more electric-blue than it is now, remembers her eyes being brighter, remembers her skin being more luminescent. But he must have been wrong, because instead of the neon-blues of her hair and eyes and the near-glowing bronze of her skin that he remembers, she looks washed-out, everything about her dull like the saturation got turned way down.
(Or maybe she looks washed-out because of the dark circles under her eyes that make her look exhausted even as she bounces on her toes in excitement.)
But you know what? He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about the fact that they have a history, that Jinx murdered his friends while her name was his first spoken word. He doesn’t care.
Ekko decides, glaring at her from across the classroom, that he’s going to just… ignore her. He can’t interact poorly with her because of the positive political and civil implications of her being here, he can’t interact positively with her because of their history and how much pain she’s caused (how much Ekko’s heart aches just looking at her and seeing the shell of Powder where she’s been dead for years), so… it’s just best to keep his distance. Ignore her. Pretend that he doesn’t even notice her. Don’t pick a fight, don’t (re)start a friendship. Easy.
Unfortunately, when Heimerdinger giggles and shoos her off so he can start teaching class, Jinx looks around, sees him, and she just… lights up even more as she bounds over to where he’s sitting in the front left of the curved lecture hall.
Ekko immediately internally groans. Fuck his life. Fuck.
She practically skips over, braid smacking into her legs as she comes to an abrupt stop in front of him.
“Hey!” she beams at him, shifting her weight in that way that has always meant excitement before she just drops into the seat next to him without asking. “I’m gonna sit here, if it’s okay?”
Ekko knows that he doesn’t really have a choice. For one thing, she’s already unloading her pockets - her phone with a mobile charger already attached, highlighters, pencils - onto the chair’s fold-out desk, and he doesn’t want to interact with her more than he has to, let alone in a hostile way - plus the fact that all of the other seats, barring a radius of two away (because the Academy still has a legacy of centuries of being anti-Zaun and most of their classmates are weird), are full.
He doesn’t respond, just shrugging slightly and focusing on his computer, hoping she gets the hint of ‘I don’t want to talk to you, please leave me alone.’
Unfortunately, having grown up together, Ekko should really know that Jinx is the kind of person that doesn’t take hints.
“So!” she says brightly, pulling out a notebook from one of her pants pockets along with a pack of pens. “This is so cool, right? I mean, all of my professors, I’m such huge fans that I’ve been asking them to sign my copies of their papers and books. It’s crazy the fact that, like- my thesis advisor, her name is Dr. Silva-”
Did she always talk this much, or has Ekko’s memory glossed that too? And- gods, her accent, that strong Corners accent where her ‘r’ is rolled and the wrong syllables get stressed and she messes up all the silent letters and ‘th’ sounds and it comes out half-sing-song, was it always that strong?
No. No, it wasn’t, she spoke in a standard Twin Cities accent the second she learned how to ditch her natural one, why is she talking in-?
“-and she actually is the one that I read her work to build my software, which is insane, because now she’s proofreading the thing that she herself inspired-”
Ekko has to take a deep breath and actively try to block her out in favor of where Heimerdinger has started writing on the board despite Jinx’s chattering. It works for maybe five minutes before her pencil drops off the desk because she got too excited and smacked her hand on the desk too many times while doing her (normal when he knew Powder) flapping-and-rocking routine and she almost whacks him with the braid.
“Oh my gods, I’m so sorry-” she says as she comes up, patting his bicep before Ekko can even flinch away or snarl not to touch him, and when she starts yapping again, Ekko finally speaks.
“Some of us need to focus.” Ekko snaps. “So if you don’t mind not talking incessantly for five minutes, that would be great. Thanks.”
“Oh.” Jinx says, and she sounds dejected for a second, but then she starts talking again, this time…
…ugh.
She fucking signs it, even though it’s muddled due to her hands being so shaky she looks like she’s having a seizure and her fingers constantly twitching like she’s a kleptomaniac. ‘I’m sorry, Ekko, I’m just really excited because I’m here and I haven’t seen you in so long.’
Ekko clenches his teeth at the use of his sign name - an ‘E,’ going from the left ear over the head to the right, where it turns to a ‘K.’
Of course she remembers. Of course she does. Fuck her. Fuck her, fuck her for everything that happened, fuck her for turning into a monster and killing his best friend and pretending everything is normal, that she has a single godsdamn right to use his sign name when she helped hold up the system that got the parents that gave him that sign name killed, when she’s the reason that Ekko was alone for so long, when she’s the reason that-
Fuck her. Fuck her for just being here.
It takes all of his restraint to not shout at her and instead just sign, sharp and clipped, ‘Pay attention.’
Jinx immediately perks up again, nodding and turning back towards the board, tucking her hands under her thighs like she’s trying not to flap again. She probably is.
For a moment, Ekko thinks that he might actually get a second of peace to listen to Heimerdinger explain electrodynamics.
But then her legs start bouncing so hard that both of their desks shake, and she starts rocking again, and she starts humming under her breath, something he recognizes as a rap song that’s been playing nonstop on the radio lately.
Ekko huffs through his nose, rests his cheek on his balled fist where he rests his elbow on the armrest, and ignores the notes on his computer in favor of just trying to absorb a modicum of the information with the hurricane, the hurricane that he wishes was just gone forever, next to him.