#vi thinking - both fondly and resentfully - of her and powder's father

[revelisms]

Excerpt: Emptied Spaces

Vi recalls her first nights as a new recruit to Zaun.

From a work in progress set after 'heron blue,' an AU where Vi and Jinx reconnect under different terms. Slow, rocky relationship rebuilding, found family messiness, and hurt/comfort abound.

A series of tinny pricks muddle the air. 

"He's not all bad, you know," her sister mumbles. 

Vi presses her nails into her palm. 

In her mind's eye, a litany of refusals. 

She sees the stairs down to the storeroom—their old room—that she'd found boarded up, paint streaked over the walls: a glaring, caution-taped denial to any who dared to enter. She sees Jinx slumped at the bar, dotting black varnish on her nails, flippant as anything to Vi's tight-mouthed questions of what had happened to their things; if there was anything left.

Just ghouls and ghosts, Jinx had said, in an accent not her own, and shot a whip-fire glare through her fringe. Then she'd grinned, cold and feline. Droused on, Key's in Silky's desk, if you care that much.

Like that room was nothing more than an ill memory, to her. Her and Vi's things. Mylo and Claggor's things. Mom and Dad's things. Vander's—

Like all of it wasn't theirs, anymore.

(Never had been.)

They had new rooms, now—ones of their own, only paces down that dark-lamped hall from each other.

Just days prior, that rat had dangled hers in front of her, in some twisted attempt at an olive branch.

It had ridiculous wallpaper and jade-tinted windows; furnishings absurdly ornate, for all their simplicity; shelves upon shelves filled with books she'd never read. They'd given her a bed with smuggled silk sheets and feathered pillows—the kind any Fissure brat in their right mind would dive into, relishing in the best sleep they'd had in years. A luxury all of them deserved. 

Her own room. A real, proper room.

Not four walls and a cot.

(Not a room with Powder.)

In silence, that bastard had stood behind her: smoke and spice on his clothes, a chill like an autumn sea seeping off his bones. The shadow of his suit had lingered in her periphery, unnervingly still. Spindly hands folded at his back; too-clean shoes canted, unmoving. 

Will it suffice? he'd graveled, eventually.

Vi'd fought down the urge to scoff.

Suffice.

As if he couldn't give a damn that he'd paid for it all on the backs of children carting industry wares as much as vials of liquid death; hadn't taken up his keep in their home, Vander's home—claimed the damned thing unrightfully as his own—and now had carved out a pathetic share to toss back to her.

Vi'd found her voice. Our old room was fine.

Hands ticking at his back. If you'd prefer to sleep on the boxes, then be my guest.

She said you emptied it.

Silence ebbing, knifing. A heaviness had snared around his bones: the kind that had rage smelting around it, slow-simmered and tightly leashed: one that set the hairs on her nape rising.

In it was an image. A memory he wouldn't give her the privilege to share.

She didn't want to picture it.

Powder, eleven years old, bruises on her cheek, standing alone in the center of that storeroom. 

Powder, frozen, for minutes or hours or ages—a tattered bunny squeezed between her hands, blood still on her clothes—before the screams finally tore their way out of her.

She didn't want to picture it—but the thought had itched within her, like a virus. She couldn't blink it out.

It's been emptied enough, Silco had answered her: a slither of a hiss. His mismatched stare had veered away, notched to an unseen point in the wall.

Under your orders? Vi'd pressed on.

Another tick of his fingers.

He'd known they'd already spoken about it. That she was aware, by then, that it was Powder—Jinx—who wanted nothing to do with that room: who couldn't sleep in it, couldn't stand to be in it; could only hover at the foot of those stairs, boots welded through the floor, every time this shark-skinned thing offered for her to go through her belongings and do with the space as she wished. 

A denial Vi couldn't grapple with had pooled nauseously in her. One he'd had no qualms in laying out to dry.

I will remind you, Silco had said, placid for all its venom, once, by whose request you are here. And he'd stared her down, like a beast waiting to strike: head tilted, eyes inhuman: chloroform polluting the sea-foam of the living one, magma igniting the ore of the dead. 

Nothing but a dull indifference. Bemusement glazed beneath a fanged snarl. 

He didn't see her as a threat, she'd realized. Not as mirrored strength to be wary of, the way Vander had. 

In the path of his leering, she felt like a child. A gutless, gut-twisted kid.

Like a pair of boxing gloves squeezed shamefully behind her back, and her father's glare simmering above her, a finger lifted slowly between them—Don't you leave her alone, again. 

In his image, the words twisted. A different voice. A dead eye. A threat that bastard didn't need to speak.

She'd heard it, all the same.

Give her one reason to regret that choice, and I will see you out, myself.

"Y'know what's funny?" Jinx says, plucking another piece of metal off her knee. Vi's fingers stutter around her hair. "You've got way more in common than you think. Little spit-fire peas in a pod, really—all Zaun this, Fissurefolk that—No pickles in the stew, Jinx; No bombs in the basement, Birdie-blue." Her sister pitters into a snort, piranha-teeth gleam over the shoulder. "It's bonkers. Like I've got two of ya, now."

And Vi pictures him occupying a similar space in this bar, this room, in her sister's own head. Pictures, dreads, refuses the thought of him toiling over a stove, with little Powder's fingertips peeking against the counter: of him standing bland and impatient in the glittering eaves of a Piltie tailor, wrinkling his brow at the colors this girl insisted on piecing together; of him waking to her tear-muddled face at ungodly hours of the morning, as Vi had done so many years before, and groggily flipping back the sheets; of holding her, at all, in a space that never should have been emptied, in the first place.

The thought curdles in her throat.

Six years—nearly seven, now.

Now, her sister speaks about Powder like a dead self. She spends her free hours dancing around that monster's desk. She has nightmares more vile that the ones Vi remembers, that made voices crawl from the walls, the kind that said the nights would never end and that none of them would ever come back, never come back again (and Mom and Dad never did, and Vander was taken from them)—

And still. 

Still, after all of it—after those terrors would send her panicked and shaken into the hall, with Vi's door already cracked and waiting; after the years Vi had cared for her, reassured her, done her best to be the lovely softness that their mother was, that she feared she could never be—Jinx would go to him, first.

Vi squeezes her eyes shut. 

Slowly, the comb picks through another tangle.

"Two of us, huh?" she mutters, a fire in her chest—and denies it.