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Jinx looks soft and young when she's asleep.
Her walls are down, and it's easier for Vi to remember that this is her baby sister when they're like this. Jinx has her face pressed against Vi's chest, arm slung around her body, their legs entangled together. Powder had always been a cuddly sleeper, and even after all those years, this hasn't changed.
It makes her heart ache, to see how things are still the same.
Vi traces Jinx's tattoos with her finger, careful not to disturb her sleep. She can feel small scars against her skin, some are old, some fairly new. There are a few she knows all too well, and there are big ones that Vi has absolutely no idea the story behind of at all.
It hurts worse to see how things are different.
Jinx is breathing softly, lips pressed in a ghost of a touch against her skin. They're both naked, bodies filled with marks they gave one another, some during sex, some during the fight the day before, and Vi wonders how she will face this when the morning comes.
"The same way I faced it all the other times," she thinks to herself, pushing away the second voice in her head that calls her a liar.
She hasn't faced it any of the other times, or they wouldn't be right back on that bed. She can sense the familiar guilt, dread, and cold panic that begins to grip her, pooling into her stomach and at the back of her neck.
She wonders what Vander would say. What her mother and father would say if they knew Powder sneaked into her apartment every other day looking for a fuck. If they knew that Vi watched eagerly as her little sister stripped, if they knew that the first time it happened Vi hadn't even thought about rejecting her.
If they knew that when morning comes, after fucking all night, she and Powder go right back to being enemies.
Enemy is such a terrible word. It feels awful in her mouth, just as much as when she calls herself an enforcer. Enforcer, criminal... Vi doesn't know how she and her sister ended up in opposing sides, much less how they ended up in the same bed.
She has no clue how to disentangle the absolute mess that is now their relationship. Powder is her baby sister, Jinx is her enemy, and this girl wrapped around Vi, who is somewhat in-between the two, is her lover.
Then again, maybe that's why their relationship is so fractured, because Vi insists in separating all those roles as different people in her mind. But she isn't sure she's ready to acknowledge that Powder is really gone, and that Jinx, who shoots at her and kills people in a regular basis, is all that's left. Or that Powder/Jinx and this girl whose thighs are still sporting Vi's bite marks, are all the same person: her sister/enemy/lover.
Lover doesn't feel nearly as awful or strange as enemy does, or as it probably should. Of all the messed up things that happened with the two of them, of all the messed up things they've done to one another, being lovers doesn't feel as significant.
Or maybe that's something she needs to tell herself.
Jinx shifts slightly, burying her face deep into the crook of Vi's neck, and she tenses up in response, feeling a rush of panic at the possibility of Jinx being awake and hostile again.
But the younger girl seems to slip right back into sleep, and Vi is left with a strange mix of relief and disappointment. Hostility broke her heart, but it's easy to deal with a storm of bullets and explosives, to deal with an enemy. It's easy to make her body move the way it needs to move to defend herself.
It's hard to stay still and watch as her sister/enemy/lover sleeps.
She wonders, if that night had gone even slightly different, if she hadn't left Powder behind... Would Vi be running her fingers onto Powder's unscarred skin instead? Would Powder still be sleeping on top of her at all? Would the both of them be fully clothed, only sibling love going through her head as she watched her little sister sleep?
Or would they still be naked and would they still be lovers?
Would they be happy?
She wonders, if she wakes Jinx up and asks her once again to run away with her, if she swears it will be just them... If Vi gave Jinx everything she has, everything she is, would it be enough? For either of them?
'We can leave and never come back. Forget everything that we used to be.'
Could they be happy?
What if Vi gave in? If she finally lets Jinx shoot her with the bullets that are carved with her name, would Jinx be happy?
Or if Vi arrests her little sister right now, throws her in Stillwater to answer for her crimes, would Vi be happy?
Being separated from her sister...
Vi wraps Jinx in a tight hug, the need for contact overwhelming her concern of waking the sleeping girl.
All she wants is to stay in this bed, holding her, forever. Jinx stays still, not giving any sign of having woken up, and Vi wants to cry, and kiss her, and promise to never let anyone - herself included - hurt her little sister ever again. Promise to find a way to make them happy.
But Vi doesn't know how to stop all the hurt that Jinx feels, doesn't know how they'll ever be able to forgive each other, doesn't know what she can do to finally make either, much less both of them, happy.
All she knows is that they can't stay like this forever, so she shuts her eyes, pulls Jinx even closer and forces herself to fall back to sleep, to enjoy this while she can, ignoring the part of her brain that keeps reminding her that this won't last.
When she wakes again it's already morning. The balcony window is wide open, Vi is alone and cold, and she finally lets herself fall apart. The things she whishes she could have said the night before, the things she whishes she had said years before, they all remain stuck in her throat.
And she knows, deep down, that even if she had said them, they would never be enough.