#in a way - for all her criticisms - i think sevika's almost a neutral party here

[revelisms]

Excerpt: You Can't Replace Her

Vi's return has Jinx floundering. Sevika sifts through the layers.

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

Sat at the table across from the kitchenette's thin galley, Jinx twists her plait about one finger—a single one, today, the weave of it adorned with scraps of bullet casings and clips—and doesn't say a word. She squeezes the cool metal of one of the casings, hard enough to sting.

"I'm not mad at you, you brat," Sevika grumbles, without sparing her a glance. "Not your fault the little shit's back from the dead. But, of the seven hells—" 

Her thick fingers spear into the creases beneath her eyes: a slow kneading. She says nothing, for a beat. Just smokes, and smokes. 

"He loves you too damned much," she growls quietly, then. She flicks the ash of her cigarette over a tray on the balcony's railing. "Your sister worth all this, to you?"

The casing between Jinx's fingers aches. 

Ever since he'd placed a meal and a plan before her—laid a quiet, terrifying choice in her hands—she'd turned the thought over, for hours, and hours. 

Do you want her near you?

She wanted her sister's presence, less than craved it—like a girl yearned for her favorite toy; like an infant wailed for their mother; like a child found comfort in the lonely walls of their room, closed off from the rest of the world.

She missed her. She was terrified of her. She longed for her. She hated her.

She hadn't been able to answer him, then. She couldn't.

The same denial sits on her tongue, now.

"I don't...I don't know," she mumbles.

"'Course you don't," Sevika snarks.

"I don't know, okay?" Jinx wrenches her head away, glaring into the yellowing paper of the wall. "She—she left me." Her nail picks and picks at her knee. "She left me, because I—I wasn't good enough, I wasn't strong enough, I was—I was weak." A crack in her voice, thin and sharp. "I was weak, and I ruined everything."

The shadow across from her chuffs, quietly. "Boss doesn't see you as weak."

Jinx curls her shoulders to her ears, pressing her cheek into one of them. "Doesn't matter."

"Like you couldn't knock me off my feet, if you tried." A steel-gray stare flicks over at her, cold points in the greenish haze that stretches beyond this small room, seeping through the open door like a sweet-soured fog. "When we took you in, you couldn't throw a punch for shit. You took to a gun like it was welded through you, though." Sevika lifts one brow, with a shrug of her shoulder. "Still need to work on your punches," she notes, dryly. "But they're better."

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."

Silco, in his own ways, had told her the same. Cradled her head beneath the cold drape of the Pilt's waves, with the gentlest sweep of his thumb: as though she were still only a scrappy street-cat of a girl, eleven years old and raging at the world. As though he were lowering himself back down into the place of his rebirth, where he had reforged himself, rebuilt himself. Where he'd found what he needed, to survive again.

She hadn't quite understood it all, then. 

She'd been too lost in the silence of the waves, in the strange peace she'd found floating in the blackwater, in the warmth of his hand lifting her back to the surface. Lost in her own fears of going back to the terrors gnashing on the shores. Too exhausted to move, to come back to herself. 

He'd carried her from the shallows, like he'd carried her back from the wreckage that day. They'd sat at the water's edge for hours, his coat draped over her shoulders, his eyes so faraway, and said nothing.

She thinks she might understand, now.