#and they have this shared thread of vander discouraging them from doing so/not being that for them

[revelisms]

Excerpt: Eye for an Eye

Silco and Vi have a chat in Stillwater.

From 'heron blue,' an AU where Vi and Jinx reconnect under different terms. Slow, rocky relationship rebuilding, found family messiness, and political schemings. Full story on AO3

She sees fire. She sees red. Red on his clothes, on his hands; in his mangled, inhuman iris; on the silvered edge of his poisoned tongue.

"Vander's prodigy." She hasn't heard the sickly gravel of that voice in six years. It ripples beneath her skin, and sits there. Etches the drawling cadence of every vowel into her bones. "I regret that we've yet had the ability to speak." 

A tilt of his head. Through the bars, doused in shadow, his mismatched stare sharpens. "I'd have made the journey sooner," he rumbles on, "but, you see—the time would be a waste, for a dead girl." His good eye narrows, a scathing flash of blue radium. "And yet."

Vi breathes in quick, harsh. She swallows it down.

He looks like a creature the Pilt chewed off and spit back out: a sinewed blot of shadow, bones and flesh, wrapped in leather and silk-weaved linen. There's an animal under his skin—a tidewater predator watching from the shallows, silent and still. Waiting.

She scuffs the sweat from her temple. Feigns indifference. "Who the hell are you?"

His brow perks. "Don't you remember?" His hands shift behind his back, held laxly there, as though folded around a knife. "Surely the walls haven't rotted your head that easily."

"I remember," Vi snarls, baring her teeth. "Like hell I'd forget." And she'd tried. Kindreds above and below, she'd tried to wipe her mind of that night, a lifetime over. Spite coils under her tongue. "But, y'know—don't really care about the name of some rat in the street. Might have to remind me, there."

She can't tell under the dim light whether the crook of his mouth is a sneer or a smile. It passes too quickly for her to care.

"Well. You've Vander's tongue as much as his damned fists, don't you?"

Her nails carve into her palms, hard enough to draw blood. She paces across the back of the cell, glaring. 

Don't you dare say his name. Don't you dare—

Silco stands still as stone, two steps from the red line that chips over the cement floor. Silver glints in his hand. He's slipped a gilded cigarette case from the breast pocket of his coat. His thin, willowed fingers pluck one roll out, snap the case shut, and flick open the hinge of its lighter. The crackling hush of the drag he takes rattles over the stones: fills the air with a dry, ambered spice. 

It's not like Vander's pipe: cheap, heady, citrus and cinnamon. It reeks of expense. It's the same peppery smoke that sits on his clothes, bittersweet and earthen, laced with juniper berry and cedar. It hisses out from his lungs, a blue thread unspooled, clouding about him in a thin haze. His dead eye leers through it.

"Come here, girl," he says, and takes a step forward. Under the ripple of the light, he's taller than she took him for; taller than she remembers, cowered on those rickety grates behind a wall of other bodies. His right eye—a frigid, dirtied blue, like the underside of a glacier—cuts to her tattered boots, and climbs. "Let me look at you."

The words gut into her, vilely. She wheels on him. Her fist slams into the bars, hard enough to make an ugly, chorusing echo through the steel. "Bastard."

"Charmed."

He stands on that thin red line, puffing away on his cigarette, and stares at her, as though trying to make sense of a riddle in a paper, or picking through the nuances of an artist's strokes. Her fingers snare hard on the bars, hard enough to stain her bloodied knuckles white. She glares right back at him. Pristine coat, lithe hands; scratched up, grayed out face; swept-back hair, flecked with silver; steel-tipped boots. There's a knife handle under his belt. A knife handle nearly in arm's reach.

"You couldn't have been more than fourteen, then," he mutters. The words carry a taint of wonder, in their remembrance. It plunges, swiftly, to distaste. "Tearing through my men, like a tank through the trenches." He scoffs. Now, he is sneering: the scarred line of his lip baring crooked teeth, his cigarette pinched between his fingers. "What good are you, left to waste away under these Piltie scum?"

"I didn't ask to be here—"

"Oh, no. You asked for revolution." His eyes spear into hers, an unwavering burn. "You were denied."

Blood ticks between her fingers, scalding on the cell bars. Those words itch into her; find the festering resentment she's left abandoned, over months and years shackled within these walls, and gnaw at it. 

"You sold Vander out," she says, heat broiling just beneath the words. "You stabbed him. I saw it. You killed him—"

"Vander sold himself out, girl," and he is walking, with the slow, prowling lope of a wolf; the fluid circling of a shark in the deep. "Laid his throat under the enforcers' boots, like a mutt on a leash. I paid my dues—nine years of it—while he sat back and cowered." He strides over the red line, and stops, inches from her battered fists. "He owed me a debt," he says, plainly. His cigarette skims the grayed blot of dead flesh that stretches over his cheek. "Eye for an eye; tooth for a tooth."

Her hands shake. She sees the flames, eating up the cannery with the roar of a living thing. Hears the bellows of their arguing, split apart in fritzing static and neon-blue. "What did you do with my sister?" 

He ticks the ash from his cigarette. It falls to a swirl of embers at his feet. "You, however," Silco prattles on, blithely ignoring her. His fingers wave through the air, with the nonchalance of a royal: a razor-edged flit of smoke and cinder. "Now—what I wouldn't have given to see you storm this wretched city, yourself. You still could, if you only had the gall." His heels sweep over the concrete: th-thump, th-thumping: fall still at one end of the cell. His eyes flit curiously across its hinges. "These bars, girl—tell me: have they strengthened you? Or leashed you, as well?"

She doesn't have time for this. You talk too much.

"What did you do with my sister—?"

"Jinx?"

A cold pit plunges through her stomach, and twists.

Because you're a jinx! Mylo was right!

"She's alive," he says slowly, the rasp of his low, scratched-out throat worlds away. The look on his face is unreadable: deceptively blank: scathing. "Safe," he adds, with a lilt of his head. "Though—as I'd been led to believe—you're good as dead, to her."

Vi pulls in a tight, heavy breath. "Her name is Powder." 

"Her name is her own. She chose it." The dagger of his teal eye thins: hunts for something under her shaking bones, something she can't see. "From what I gather," he mulls, "it was your parting gift." 

Slices in.