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revelisms · 8 months

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Excerpt: What You Needed

After years, Jinx and Vi are reunited—and starting to make amends.

From ‘heron blue,’ an AU where Vi and Jinx reconnect under different terms. Slow, rocky relationship rebuilding, found family messiness, and political schemings. cw: abandonment issues, dissociation, psychosis, dysfunctional family dynamics Full story on AO3

Her painted fingers clink out a red-capped glass bottle, and hold it stiffly across from her. "You...still like the cherry ones, right?"

Vi takes it from her, slowly, criss-crossed on the blankets across from her. "You bet," she says softly. Her mouth makes a strange twist: not quite a smile. She turns the bottle in her hand. "Still like blueberry?"

Jinx screws off the cap of her own, a glittering spin off the stones. "Uh, yeah—best of the bestest."

The lights hum around them, a pleasant, blitzy static. Jinx draws up her knees, curls her arms around them, and sips. For a long, horrible moment, there's nothing for them to say. Nothing she can get out: the questions stuck in her stomach, in her heart, like lead on her tongue.

Why did you leave me—?

"When...when did you build this?" Vi's looking at the decorations all around them, the paint and the color and glow, with a quiet awe.

Jinx wonders, for a moment, if she means the alcove or the club itself. They'd kept the bones, but rebuilt it all, straight from the ground up. No more smelly storeroom—too many ghosts; all boarded up now. They'd cleaned and sanded and revarnished the floors; painted the rooms, retiled the bathrooms; brought in that beautiful imported glass to bubble around the walls, a new addition to the spaces wholly their own on the third floor, with the same old staff kitchen and storage closets and divots in the walls.

Jinx shrugs, bobbing her knee. "Oh, I dunno—years ago."

Vi's smiling, now. She looks down at the bottle in her hands: twists off the cap. "I...I missed this, y'know. All your creations."

It lights up something in Jinx's heart, like a little lamp tuned to life. "I—I never stopped, really," she says, a flash of her teeth. "Painted up my room all pretty—oh—I just got this new color in from that big guy in the third district." She props closer, with a brightening grin. "It's, like, the prettiest blue—gonna put it on Whambo. He's gonna be a nail bomb. And I might use it for some details, on Fritz—he's a smoke flare, mostly, but he can double as a firecracker launcher—cool, right? I've been trying to get the combustion ratio right, for ages, but the thing keeps fizzlin' out too early—that old doc's tried to give me equations, but ugh—anyway. Work in progress, Fritz."

And then she's telling her about Jabberwock the ray gun, that she'd engraved with the emblem of a little seahorse—and about the Zing-Dusters she'd built: the respirators they used in the air dispensaries, that she was making a new model of—and the water filtration systems they were going to pilot in the rotted hovels of the Sump, once they got the right treated metals in.

She tells her about Tullo the mechanic, a giant of a man, with hair to his knees and tattoos gaudy as a pirate's, who she gets her imports from. Tullo, who Sevika got in a fight with the other day, after he'd called her arm just for show—and Sevika was a big old ogre, just as awful as ever: she ate blood sausage and grits for breakfast—yeuch!

She's rambling, on and on: the words pouring out of her: a runoff of shaky-laughed, tense-shouldered babbling.

There's so much she doesn't say.

She doesn't tell her about Little Man. She doesn't tell her about the voices in her head, or Mylo or Claggor, or her stuffed rabbit nailed to the wall, or how she spent years and years trying to carve herself in the chasm she'd left behind, not knowing why she wasn't enough, good enough, worth enough to bring her back; or how Silco would find her beating her hands bloody in the old arcade, or how he never laughed, not really, and never, ever cried, except when he talked about Vander, and then he nearly did both; or how, sometimes, when Sevika laid her arm around her, it almost, almost felt like hers—and she does not tell her about how Powder is dead and gone and drowned, drowned in a well, drowned by Jinx's own hands, and Jinx—Jinx is strong, now.

The voices ring through her ears: a pitching, endless drone.

It's too quiet, again.

Jinx swallows, fidgeting. She lifts her eyes from the roof. Vi is just looking at her, looking and frowning, with that burning sort of sadness Jinx hates. She's looking at her, and not saying a word—and for all Jinx doesn't tell her any of that, she is terrified that in some small, terrible way, she knows it, all the same.

"You're quiet," Jinx mumbles. She rips her eyes down, again.

Vi reaches over, wraps her hand beneath her own. "I know—I know. I'm sorry, I'm just..." She huffs out a breath, turning away, staring at the bustle of the streets. "I'm just thinking." She's nervous: her hands heavy and fiddling, so warm over Jinx's own. "It's—it's just..." Vi clears her throat. "It's been so long, I've been—I've been so worried about you."

Jinx scrapes her nail over her thumb. Those words hit something unpleasant inside her—worried about you—plunge a sickly chill in her stomach: a blazing knot of self-disgust, of rage; of sharp, splintered old hurt.

The words trapped in her throat bubble out, before she can stop them. "Why..." They stick like grease on her teeth. "Why did you leave me?"

She knows they cut at her sister. She knows they sting.

Part of her wants them to.

Vi looks down. She weathers her thumb over Jinx's own. "I—I tried to get back to you, I promise." The same as she'd said, before. "I did—but I—"

"You left me." It sounds so pitiful coming out of Jinx's mouth, and she despises herself for it. She yanks her hand out from Vi's own: tucks it under her knee. "I didn't—I didn't understand—"

"I know," Vi hushes. "I know, I—there hasn't been a day I haven't regretted it. Not a single one, from every damned night I was in that cell—but I—I just—" Her shoulders sink. She's looking away, forcing air through her teeth. "I needed time."

Something blitzes up Jinx's neck: leaves her head twitching.

You're not ready!

She scowls slow at the tiles. "Away from me."

"That's not—"

I told you to stay away!

Jinx scrapes her nails against the stones. "Things changed, when you left." Air shudders against her teeth. She fights the heat broiling in her throat: blinks it quick out of her eyes. "I—I changed," she whispers.

Vi's hands fist between her knees. Something in her turns venomous: like it did in Silco, when someone said something that got under his skin; when he let his words turn harsh and biting, looming over his constituents, a shadow of a monster with red-tipped wings.

"If I'd known you were here," Vi is saying, a low firmness in the words—and Jinx knows where they're going, before she even speaks them; feels her shoulders draw firm as stone. "If I could have—I would have done anything to find you; I would have got you out of here, as soon as I—"

A numbness washes through Jinx's veins.

"Got me out," she repeats.

She feels so far away from herself. Floating.

She's seeing Little Man, with his hair still short and his arms still gangly: his hand shackled around her wrist, hard enough to crush her, pleading to a girl who didn't exist—Powder, come with me, please—we've found a place in the sewers, away from all of this, where you'll be safe—whatever he's done, I'll make sure he never gets to you, again—

"I don't need you to save me," Jinx bites out. Tension gnaws through her fingers: turns them white-knuckled on her knee.

Mylo's wrong, Powder. You're stronger than you think.

You're strong, now—just like you were always meant to be.

She wrenches her head from the words, the memories: Vi's fist colliding with her cheek, Silco's thumb sweeping against it. "I never needed you to save me, I—I needed—"

Because you're a jinx! Mylo was right!

Jinx is perfect.

"Someone else," Vi mutters. Jinx falters, ice in her lungs. Stares wide-eyed at her. Vi is frowning at the green glow beyond them, rasping her thumb against the wrapping over her knuckles. She takes in a hard, gritty breath, and eases it out. "I know," she continues. "I left you, and he—" The look in her eyes turns so strange: bitter, scathing. "He showed up." It's like the words are pulling out her teeth. Her thumb presses hard into her knuckles. "And maybe, that's—that's what you needed."

Jinx tries to swallow. Heat burns and burns in her throat. "You want me to hate him," she tests, prickling with spite. "You don't want me to be here." Flashes of color outside the edges of her vision: eyes and faces and howling words. "You don't like him—you don't like any of them—well, none of you all liked me, either—"

"That's not true—"

Ghosts are picking at her ears and clawing at her arms and too loud.

"—because I—I was just some—some loose screw, screw-up, always screwing things up—shut up!" She wrenches her head into her hands, squeezes it tight, tight between her nails, to keep her skull from splitting open. "Shut up, shut up!"

Vi's looking at her like she's broken, a wind-up toy with all the cogs gone: like something she doesn't know how to fix. Carefully, her bandaged hand lays over her knee. "That's not true, and you know it," she says gravely. The words crack. "We loved you, Powder. Vander, and Mylo, and Claggor—"

"Don't." Jinx seethes it out, feral: wrenches herself away from Vi's burning hand. "Stop." She breathes long, cavernous, heaving. "Stop, don't—I don't want to think about them—I don't want to think about them, I don't—"

Vi closes her eyes, clenches her jaw. "Okay."

"I don't," Jinx hisses again. There's too much color in her eyes, too much noise in her head.

Vi's holding her. She doesn't remember when she started holding her.

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revelisms · 6 months

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Heron Blue — Excerpts & Quotes

A very self-indulgent mishmash of some of my favorite bits from the story. Full work on AO3.

Rating: T | WC: 29k | 6 Chapters | Multi-POV | Complete Summary: Neon paint can do wonders to most things—even a den of wolves. Or: Silco catches wind of Vi's imprisonment before Caitlyn. He gets to her, first. | Ep 4 canon divergence/AU where Jinx and Vi reconnect under different terms. CW: Themes around war, abuse, and dysfunctional family dynamics. Brief mentions of child labor, psychosis, physical violence, and manipulation.

Chapter 1

His eyes sit, steady as a notched arrow, on the shadow of a monolith leering out from the gloom. At its feet, a thin apparition: an old Piltie skipper putting over the waves, his swinging lamp a single-lit point of salvation. A silver-haired Charon, awaiting to ferry the dead. Looming on the horizon, a coal-drenched hell.

"Sure you don't want company, over there?" Sevika grouses to him, sticking the roll back between her teeth.

His mouth twitches, a stone's throw from a gambler's grin. "Only ghouls and ghosts," he says, without a trace of warmth. "And I've enough of those."

Chapter 2

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?"

"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."

"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?"

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.

Chapter 3

Too long, now. Too long in this shell, waiting for the rot to eat him alive: for this city to crumble and burn: for every card, meticulously laid, to fall at the tip of a finger, flushing out that damned council, for good—

His head rolls back on his shoulders. Slowly, he sighs out a plume of silvered blue: an exorcism; a reforging.

All in good time.

The night's bitter air wafts off the blackwater, a familiar, nauseating cocktail of soiled runoff, factory smog, chem-tainted rain. Oil and water. It claws its soured fingers about the edges of his coat, and pulls it back into place. Chases after the stride of his heels, and beckons him. His city, winged and glittering, breathing filth like dragon-smoke; her scales painted glass; her gold liquid charoite.

He flicks the spent cigarette into the gutters, and walks on.

He has work to do.

"The sister?" Sevika had baffled at him, after the atom bomb, and one cigar, and a second. "What good could she bring to us? You've already got one wire on the fritz; you want two?"

The threat of Vander's eldest resurrection had consumed him, like some hellish, prophetic vision. Then a scheme had consumed him, two-fold. He'd collected the scraps of it across his desk, sculpting a glass castle from every strand of smoke in the air, until it glittered.

"What does she need?"

"The girl?" Sevika had scowled, shrugging one shoulder. "A face to smash in. Bloodthirsty little bitch; lived for a fight, from the day she showed up."

"Beneath that?"

"Beneath what? Human punching bags?" Her mouth had crooked at a frown. "Purpose, reason—what do any of us need?"

"A cause."

She'd stared at him, a flicker of recognition in her gunmetal eyes. Then, she'd huffed.

"What about Jinx?" A hairline fracture. "She'll implode."

Silence.

For a millennia, he'd swirled a glass of his scotch in slow, liquid orbits, and thought. The castle tilting on its axis. Schemes rebuilt.

"She'll understand," he'd said, eventually.

Sevika had bitten off the tip of a cigarillo, struck a match from his desk, and smoked. "You've got too much faith in the brat." A scoff, harsh and familiar. "She'll hate you."

He'd stared into the amber of his whisky, glazed with a spider's spiral of stained glass, and wondered.

"Perhaps."

"I don't want to go," Jinx croaks. She shakes upon her heels. "I don't want to—"

"I know." His hand settles over her temple, before her own can ravage against it. "I know," he whispers, again.

She's mewling nothings between the sobs that thrash out of her: heaving them into his shirt, her body slumping into his: a fruitless snatching of her fists, half-hearted in their battering. "You lied," she cries. Another thud of her palm, hollow as a skipped stone. He smooths his hand over the back of her shoulder, and holds her still. "You lied!"

The dry silence of the air serves only as an echo chamber to her wails. It eats around her small bones, and knifes through him. "I know," he hushes.

He cradles her until she cries herself out: until those ghosts leave her head quiet and still: until her sniffling weakens to a silent, heavy languor, like a thin branch swayed in the wind. They stand in the wreckage of the room's dark, amidst the litter of his paperwork, scattered like pale petals on the floor, and say nothing.

Her fingers lay leaden and claw-like against his waistcoat, her hair a torrent about her thin shoulders. After a long, long moment, her voice rasps, "I miss her," into his clothes, soft as a bird's nesting trill.

He tucks her head beneath his chin, and swallows.

"I know, child," he breathes, quietly. He lays in blood-muddled water, beneath the fires and the storms. She clings to him, like an anchor: and, in turn, melds to his own. "I missed him, too."

Chapter 4

"I thought we might have a talk," he says, painfully quiet, in that tone he only reserves for her.

Her thumb digs into the seam of her comforter. "Shoot," she mumbles.

He takes a seat at the edge of her bed, the mattress slouching under his weight. "Bomb or bullet?"

"Ugh."

"Sevika's a soldier: the best any can claim. But she's no rally of the people. Never has been, and never will be."

She catches his train of thought, easily as a red thread pressed over a map. "Not like Vander."

She says it callously: sharper than needed, than she wants. He does not talk to her about him. Rarely does he even mention him by name—not unless she asks directly; unless she has taken the scraps of their conversation and held it at a knifepoint.

At one time, she could feign childish innocence, curiosity, for what had happened between them. Older, now, she sees the scars it leaves in him, like gold through a broken pot: the shell of something that should no longer be.

"What if she hates me?" The words cling to her teeth, barely whispered. She snares her arms about the point of her knees. "What if she hates how I'm—I'm different—if she—"

"If she finds a thing to hate, then she's a fool." Jinx blinks, her mouth wobbling to a thin frown. "You've only found your wings, dove."

In the center square, at the heart of the Lanes, stood a statue: a monolith of cobbled bronze. Vander's own image, striding tall in the night, a pipe lit at his hand. As though he'd never left. As though the city had grown around him: laid a memorial to his very soul in the palm of her hand.

Vi stands before it, silently, as small as she'd always felt before him. He looms above a fountain that ripples with a greenish taint, where passers-by have left coins for luck. They've left other things, too—countless bric-a-brac of mementos, laid upon the outer rim of the fountain's edge: bottles of his favorite bourbons, dried petals of sea-lilies scrapped from the Pilt's shallow shoals, flickering candlesticks and stacks of skipping-stones.

Above a plaque of fine print reads three words. Revolutionary, Founder, Father. Alongside those titles, their people had left their own markers and tributes. Signatures and symbols scratched into the metal, a thousand times over. Names Vi knew. Names she'd forgotten. Names she could never forget.

Caitlyn stands beside her, studying the statue for some time. "Who was he?" she murmurs quietly. "This...Vander?"

Not, Who was he to you?

Where her parents laid forgotten in the rubble, he had built a hand-crafted sun, and lifted her and Powder towards it. She'd thought it was magic, then. Now, it's scraps and paper, its frame crushed, the light gone. A street-magician's cheap trick, left to rot in the puddles.

Chapter 5

Marcus clears his throat. Squeezes his fingers around his knife. "If it isn't too much to ask," he starts, the words poisonous, unfettered, "then I'd like an explanation. I've enough on my hands to finish, today. Afraid some of us don't have hours to kill."

Silco levels a pointed look at him: a slow tilt of his head. "An explanation." The simmer of its repetition sets a chill through Marcus's shoulders. A bite of meat, chewed and swallowed. The fork, set quietly across the rim of his plate. "Yes, do explain something to me." Silco folds his hands along the table's edge, leaning into them. "Unless I'm mistaken, your contract stipulates that no enforcer shall set foot in the Lanes without first being disclosed to me. Is that correct?"

Marcus stares into a teal eye, cold as frosted glass. "Yes."

"I see." Silco's thumbs steeple against each other, a thin, bone-pale point. "In that case, tell me: why is it I've seen one of your own prowling through these streets, like she owns them?"

The next breath Marcus drags in feels like nails through his lungs. He opens his mouth to speak.

"Better yet," Silco drawls on, before the words can form, "tell me who's escorting her. Either my age is getting to me, you see, or she's dragged a soul from the Pilt." The flash of his eye narrows. "One, I recall, you had taken care of, yourself."

Sand sticks in Marcus's throat. "That's—that's impossible."

It's a bare reach at denial. No doubt this shark sees right through it, like sniffing blood through water.

"Is it?" Silco tacks his thumb across his knuckle. "Well—in that, we must agree."

Mylo's voice scratches and claws through Jinx's ears.

"So what?" she spits. "I'm not—not like her. I'll never be like her."

"Why do you need to be?" Those eyes again, staring hard at her. "You can't replace her." Sevika huffs, turning back to the smog-tainted view that spills down from the balcony's edge. "If you had that in your head, with her gone—sure as hell doesn't matter, now."

The words tear at something in Jinx's bones, buried so deep into the marrow that it uproots her. She blinks. Breathes. Shakes.

"Something you Fissure brats should've learned, years ago," Sevika rumbles on, a low, muted thing. "Someone dies, you leave them dead. You don't carry around their corpse, making yourself into their image; you don't become them, to you, or to anybody else." She ticks the ash from her cigarette. "You can't."

Jinx's fingers tremble over her knee. The swallow she forces down clings like ash to her throat. "Then," she whispers, "then what do I—what do I do?"

Sevika's mouth curls at a snarl.

"You be." A final drag: the cigarette crushed into the tray, among a litter of countless others. "Whatever you need for yourself, first. Damn the rest."

Quietly, Silco pulls a cigar from a cherrywood box. The ritual breaks the stillness like the ringing of a pleasant bell: the casing snipped, the lighter shinked, the leaf simmering. The bittersweet of its spice wafts across the air, loosening the tension in Jinx's bones, by fractions.

"You need only say a word, and I'll stay."

Her nails pinch through the stripes of her pantleg. "I know."

He takes another long drag, and rests his head back against his chair: sighs it out in a bluish plume. She watches the swirl of it fade into the shadows of the rafters, for a long time.

Slowly, her fingers reach for his, laid lax against his knee. "Are you scared?" she whispers.

His eyes slip down to her. He turns her hand gently beneath the warmth of his own. "No, child," he says quietly. A pause. "Though," he drawls, "she might make a state of my floors. Can't imagine she knows to clean her boots."

Despite herself, Jinx smiles.

"The mine operators had them doing worse." His cigar ticks between his fingers. "I would know, girl. I was one of theirs."

Like Dad.

She freezes in her tracks. Her eyes swivel to his, rife with disbelief.

He carries himself with too much grandeur; drapes himself with too many pieces of finery. A man from the dredges wouldn't have the care for such things. Wouldn't flash them around his neck, across his fingers, around every inch of this hoarded room, like treasures to be displayed.

"You," Vi breathes, and the word sticks. "You worked in the mines?"

He takes a long, slow drag of his cigar. "From the day I was ten," he mutters, his voice low and muddling. He tilts his head back against his chair. Furrows his brow. "We dug the tunnels that fed half of this city's water lines. A third of the sewers. Coal, for Piltover's freighters and furnaces; steel, for their war-machines; ore, for their electrical wire." His mouth twitches at a snarl. "All while our people starved, and froze, in this sunless pit."

Chapter 6

Vi is stomping up the stairs. Vi is fuming, and shoving the door open, and furious—and Jinx is Powder is nine years old, her smile plummeting. Vi is crying about Mom, and she's so angry, and Powder doesn't remember, can't remember her why can't she remember. Powder is ten and Vi is grabbing her arm too hard, worried, desperate, enforcers on their heels, the alleys moving too fast for her to breathe. Powder is weak and a burden and Powder is eleven and only wants to help only wants to help only wanted to help—

Powder is Jinx is eleven going on sixteen, crumpled on the floor, the handles of the desk drawers eating into her back, her hands snared so tight about her knees that her fingers feel like they might break, her bones as small as she can make them, hiding away, hiding like she always used to.

Vi is feet away, Vi doesn't see her, and Vi is yelling—

(About her about her always about her—)

And Silco's voice is the crackle of a hearth: the one she used to sit beside in his old home beneath the river. His words low and embering, burning and calm, like a forest fire, and Vi is a lightning storm, and Jinx is the rain trapped between them.

Her hand finds the blended silk of his pantleg, bunching the fabric to a cold knot in her palm.

He does not look at her: does not give her away—she wanted to be here, wanted to know what Vi would say, wasn't ready but would be, would be—but he gives her his hand, in a silent touch.

Jinx is not Powder is not Vi is eleven going on sixteen and clinging to his thumb like a child, and Vi isn't as angry anymore. Vi, maybe, is understanding. Would maybe understand her.

Jinx needs to see her. She needs to say something. She needs to, but she can't—and Silco must know: because he holds out the stolen Hexstone (her prize, her wonder, her job, her own), in a wordless regifting: a window of opportunity.

Jinx breathes, slow and quiet.

She takes it.

His fingers tick on the file he's gathered. He tilts his head. "You were right," he rumbles, after a moment. There's a veil of humor in it: deprecating, displeased. "Her sister's after a damned fight, in everything she does."

Sevika scoffs around the point of her tobacco, the jagged edge of a lionness's grin. She plucks the roll from her teeth, hangs it over her shoulder. "Still sure you want to deal with that?"

He takes it from her fingers, and trades it for the paperwork in his hand. Ashes swirl in a thin spiral at their feet. The parchment glows with the long drag he takes. "I'll tolerate it," he sighs out.

"You don't tolerate anything."

He hums, a twitch at the scarred lines of his mouth, and hands the cigarillo back to her. "I tolerate you."

"I don't need you to save me," Jinx bites out. Tension gnaws through her fingers: turns them white-knuckled on her knee.

Mylo's wrong, Powder. You're stronger than you think.

You're strong, now—just like you were always meant to be.

She wrenches her head from the words, the memories: Vi's fist colliding with her cheek, Silco's thumb sweeping against it. "I never needed you to save me, I—I needed—"

Because you're a jinx! Mylo was right!

Jinx is perfect.

"Someone else," Vi mutters.

They called him a crimelord. A king.

He walks like a shark swims around prey.

She'd expected he'd have prowled in front of her, as though she were only a dog in his presence, left to chase at his heels; or to trail behind her, distant and observing, leveling an unseen gun at her head.

He's done neither. At a comfortable distance, hands folded loosely at his back, he's found a slow lope alongside her hesitant steps: matching her pace, in silence. She's been put, perhaps intentionally, on his right side. She's only able to see the humanity in his face: peppering hair and a teal eye and a crow-like sharpness to his profile; a picture of ease, rather than the monstrous edge of scarring and fire that litters the other.

Caitlyn tenses her fists and stares at the street. Whatever angle he was playing at, she hadn't the mind to pick apart yet. Her spite at Marcus was still simmering in her head.

"You've left your guards," she says, after a moment.

He turns a curious glance down to her, an unnerving gleam in that one eye that glows like an animal's, that shouldn't reflect the way it does. "Should I have brought them?" he murmurs. Her throat hitches on a swallow. He eyes it, absently: turns back to the lane that stretches on in a greenish haze before them. "Rest assured, Officer—these streets are as safe for me as they were left for you."

An unvoiced revelation: a warning. Something prickles under her skin, like ice water through her veins.

Of course he'd had them surveilled. She had no doubt, now, that she and Vi had been followed from the moment they set foot in the Underground. As they likely were being followed, now.

The realization slices at her: turns her eyes skittering around the alley, despite herself.

Silco huffs a low breath, a slithering hiss off his chipped teeth. "So suspicious."

Kindreds—he was as louring as Vi had made him out to be.

"I've a right to be."

"Tell me, Vi," he says, a flit of his mismatched eyes. "What do you make of this city?"

Sevika scoffs, arching one brow. "What're you asking her for? Not like she didn't grow up in it."

"It's got a name," Jinx huffs. She skips over to the desk, bounding on its edge, a sheet of blank paper in hand. She rifles through a painted cup on his desk, hunting out a bright pen.

Silco doesn't bat an eye at their banter—as if it's something he endures, by the day. He stays fixed on Vi's own stare, silent, curious.

She sinks into the empty chair, with a scowl, her arms locking across her chest. "City's always had a name," she says plainly. "Zaun."

The word must mean something more than she knows, for Silco smiles: slow and genuine, a deadly charm for all its crooked, scar-scraped jaggedness. "Zaun, indeed." The words echo around the room, with the cadence of a rite: a devotion: a promise.

This is the first of several works-in-progress in this AU. Somewhere down the line, you can expect more stories focusing on Vi and Jinx's relationship, Vi begrudgingly beginning to look up to Silco as a mentor/father figure, plus some CaitVi, Melvika, Silco x m!OC, and general crime family shenanigans :-)

Quick Links: Scraps and Doves (AO3) | More excerpts from the series

#writing #arcane #arcane fanfic #fic excerpt #heron blue #heron!verse #scraps and doves #silco arcane #sevika arcane #jinx arcane #vi arcane #this has been in my drafts FOREVER #and...yes 90% of this is just silco dialogue but he was so much fun to write in this

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