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Everything that Jinx knew was something fluid and undefined. Ever-changing and ever-shifting; a mirror of the way her own mind functioned. She sees the world in color, the way people speak and breathe, the way they look at things and the emotions that come from them bleed in colors that Jinx had learned over time to identify.
Her home of Zaun was a canvas of swirling color, never keeping the same tones or brush strokes as tunnels collapsed and were cleared out, streets blasted to ruin and slowly made usable again over time. Entire communities uprooted and shifted by violence; either through relocation, willing or otherwise, or death.
The people in Jinx’s life, they were fluid too. One day Vander was there, a stocky quicksilver steel full of comforting stalwart colors like dark green satisfaction and orange happiness, then he wasn’t. One day Little Man was there, full of electric blue curiosities and surprise and the bruised gray irons of determination and stubbornness; now in his place is a mask that shifts and blinks in time that causes aches and pains in Jinx’s chest and stomach, not all of them from bruises.
One day Violet was there, with her colors so much like Vander except with so much more crimson-orange anger, and now there’s just Fat Hands. Full of purple and cyan confusion and deep coal-black smears of regret.
One day Silco was there, a myriad of colors but all of them muted and kept beneath a gray, blank exterior, and now there’s just a vacant void in whatever tattered remains are left of Jinx’s soul, with nightmares to accompany them; always full of twisted feelings and warped words, the clashing contradictions of Silco’s love and Silco’s fear. Fear he inspired, fear he demanded, fear he owned and fear he created.
Attitudes, the way people thought about Jinx, that changed a lot too. In Zaun she was everything and nothing all at once; a hero and a savior to some, an heir to Silco’s empire and a symbol of Zaunite independence. To others she was a demon, a fickle trickster who could end a life as easily as she would blow out the flame on a candle.
To Piltover she was a terrorist, a criminal. Both a real threat and a ghost story, a cautionary tale and an urban legend, demonized by those in power while a twisted version of herself was idolized by scant scatterings of rebellious youths who emulated her in childish ignorance of what truly made Jinx, creating pale imitations of her sigils and symbols.
All sorts of colors, all sorts of blends and twists and curls.
Everything changed, and anything could change. There was no use trying to predict it or stop it or stem the flow of it, Jinx could not shove her hands into the rent and open flesh of Fate and pinch its arteries closed to prevent the spurting blood from soaking her and changing everything, anything, on a whim; a roll of the die, a flip of the coin, a single misplaced word or idea or one careless action.
She stopped trying a long time ago.
The only thing that never changed was that Jinx never stopped changing, consistent in her chaos and shattered perception. Sure, on the surface things were still similar; she had her preferred calling cards and tastes in mayhem, but that didn’t mean other things couldn’t change.
Just because she hadn’t found a better design yet for her bombs than the monkey didn’t mean she wouldn’t someday. Besides, she kept coming up with more and more creative ways to use the monkeys so that basically counted.
Jinx simply followed the whims of whatever current was pushing her, tracing the broken pattern of her mind and walking that fiery, jagged line. Sometimes it would double back and curl in upon itself, sometimes it would splinter and shatter and leave Jinx falling in an endless void for a while before she once again found her feet on the jagged, angry red line in her mind that showed her the path forward.
That was how she had spent the last five years since The Rocket.
Then, one day, everything changed again.
~~~~~
Jinx was fairly certain she wasn’t supposed to see that.
The lightshow.
It was spectacular. She was almost jealous.
Almost.
At first when Jinx had seen the first sign of her, she was mostly just fascinated and curious. She had been casing the streets looking for the next fun thing to explode, and she saw. She saw the little light cupped in her palms and that jagged red line pivoted hard in her mind, sending her careening into the path of bright lights and color and singed hair and bright-red burnt skin; smoldering embers leftover not from a blazing fire but from a piercing spear of light.
Jinx put away the monkey bombs and Fishbones’s favorite snacks, only carrying Zapper loosely fastened onto one of the loops around the waist of her shorts. She covered up her iconic baby-blue hair and wound her long braids up into something resembling a bun, tucking it under the hood of a brown cloak; the lower half of her face covered with hastily-tied cloth as she walked the streets of Piltover for the first time without the intention to blow something up.
Because if she blew something up she’d have to run away from Fat Hands and Hat Lady, and if she was running away from Fat Hands and Hat Lady she couldn’t watch her.
She didn’t know her name.
Jinx didn’t particularly care to find out.
The name wasn’t important. What was important was that she had two faces. What was important was the fact that when Jinx would see her in public during the day she was surrounded by armored guards, at least five, but when she was at night she was alone and cloaked and lighting her way with a shining prism of pure color and shimmering, soothing starlight.
Jinx didn’t know why, but looking at that little prism she would hold in her hands to light her way at night gave her comfort and soothed something deep in her core.
So she had to follow her. To see it more. To drink it in more.
She wasn’t Piltovan, Jinx could tell that much. She didn’t know a lot about the world but Silco had tried to teach her, tried to inform her of the wide expanses of land and peoples that lay beyond the comparatively small and meaningless Piltover and Zaun.
Demacia.
A place of iron militaristic rule, Silco said. Masquerading as champions of justice and honor in opposition to the corruption and tyranny of Noxus while duplicitously practicing their own horrors inside their borders, Silco said.
Jinx wasn’t paying much attention at the time but now she wished she had. She wanted to know more about her , this strange Demacian woman who traveled with guards in the sunlight but alone under the moon, lighting her way with prisms of light and color that Jinx knew was magic.
Demacia hated magic.
Which was why the woman was so fascinating to Jinx. She was a walking contradiction, two-faced and two-hearted and two-minded. Jinx was used to hypocrisy and the dissonance inherent to the world, but something about the way this woman carried herself, so defined in equal ways across a harsh border that for a brief time Jinx entertained the possibility that she was following a set of identical twins.
One whose colors were brown and dull and wooden, and one whose colors were furtive and panicked and secretive. Full of reds and sickly green secrets.
And when she saw the lightshow , well. Jinx just had to know more.
She had followed the woman again at night, and this time, unlike the others, she moved with purpose and intent. Before, she had simply seemed to be looking at the streets of Piltover without a crowd around her, mapping and memorizing and seeing. Jinx always kept her distance, always kept quiet, knew how to cloak herself in shadow and dark corners as she watched and waited and moved and followed.
The woman lit her way with that little prism of soft euphoria and Jinx followed behind, flitting from alley to rooftop to dark shadow, always out of sight, always keeping her in sight.
Eventually she came to an empty lot in a back alley that Jinx knew well; it was close to one of the little tunnels and passages that led into Zaun if you knew what you were doing, but Jinx was fairly certain this woman had no interest in Zaun.
She sat down and crossed her legs, and seemed to meditate.
Jinx crouched low on a nearby rooftop and watched.
The little prism in her palms began to grow. It grew and pulsed and beat like it was alive and breathing and it sparkled and shone and cast color and strange dancing patterns of twisting, ever-shifting bliss and soothing comfort.
When she opened her eyes next, Jinx was fascinated to see them glow and shine like little beacons of path and certainty, two bright stars illuminating the dark and shadowy void that surrounded Jinx’s jagged pattern. They imprinted themselves upon it, gleaming and shining and Jinx had to follow them, had to get closer had to see had to feel their light.
The jagged pattern felt afraid and felt as if it were about to collapse but Jinx was no longer looking at the angry red line of fire that traced esoterically through her psyche. She was looking up, up up up at the two guiding stars that had appeared in the inky blackness above.
She took a breath then and moved her hands, manipulated the prism with her fingers and sent a burning burning burning beam of pure ecstasy outwards at the wall opposite her. It struck the wall with a force and Jinx exhaled in a mix of awe and devoted exhilaration as she saw the blackened stone left behind, the heady smell of ozone hanging in the air as the woman breathed deeply down below.
Jinx knew the smell of ozone, the smell of burning and the feeling of ripping tearing shredding destructive power held in the palm of her hand, but no bomb she ever built, no gun she ever fired, no rocket or monkey had ever been as beautiful as that one sundering beam of the brightest light.
But she didn’t seem to agree. Jinx could see her face as she stared at the blackened, chipped stone, her chest rising and falling with heavy, rapid breath. Her eyes were wide and bleeding redredred, bleeding the red that was full of delicious fear , fear of the power she had just shown and Jinx knew, she knew that she was not supposed to see that.
She also knew that it was only an iota , a drop of the Power this woman held inside of her.
Jinx needed to see more.
After that, following her was less of an idle curiosity and grew into an obsession. She listened and watched, she anonymously made payments for information to tell her more about the woman; information that could only be gained in places she could not go.
Jinx had heard her guards say her name a few times but it always slid off of her ears, because Jinx did not want to hear her name from strange men that did not have light and color bursting from their chests she wanted to hear the name from her.
But she did find out other things.
She was a foreign dignitary from Demacia, as Jinx had suspected, a cultural attache sent as part of a larger collective from the White-Gold Kingdom to begin making overtures and connections to Piltover on behalf of the Crown.
The reason for this was that their ever-growing enemies in Noxus were also beginning to express interest in Piltover, in its technology and riches and capacity for war. Demacia considered Piltovan work to be too close to magic; especially with the advent of Hextech, but they didn’t want Noxus to get their hands on it either. The diplomatic corps they sent was not to secure Piltovan assets for their own use, but to convince the City of Tomorrow to remain neutral in the conflict between Demacia and Noxus.
Her purpose, Jinx gathered, was to be a pretty face. She was the younger sister of a man named Garen Crownguard and her presence was a token display of respect from the Crown. The Crownguard family was Important and Noble and Powerful, but all of that Power resided with her older brother, her parents. Not her.
She was only the second child; and a daughter to boot. According to the information Jinx got, the most political power she could hope to have was as a token, a bargaining chip, a pawn to be moved and manipulated to ensnare a useful target with the lure of wealth and power and status in the White-Gold Kingdom as her husband.
But Jinx, she knew better. She knew that she was so much more than that.
She was a guiding light; a shining star that pierced inky black skies and showed Jinx a new path. She didn’t need power, she was power.
So Jinx continued to follow, to watch and wait for her guiding star to set the path for her, to tell her what she needed so Jinx could provide. Jinx was used to being a weapon, she was used to being a tool. Powder was a broken tool, a jammed gun, a dull sword. Useless. But Silco had sharpened her, Silco had made her stronger, Silco had made sure she would never jam again. Silco had fixed her and she was a powerful and terrible weapon in his hands; and with him gone, Jinx was a gun without a wielder, a bomb with a faulty detonator, a sword without a master.
Many had tried to step into Silco’s shoes and demand her subservience and her obedience, had tried to fire her and detonate her and wield her as he did but she refused them all. They were not worthy of Jinx, their hands unskilled and their methods blunt and dull and uncreative. Lacking in interest and only serving the needs of greed and personal power. Jinx didn’t have a problem with selfishness; Silco was selfish, she was selfish.
But Silco’s selfishness served a Greater Purpose, something bigger than himself or Jinx. He was Worthy.
Jinx did not yet know if she was selfish, she did not yet know how she would be wielded, but every time she saw that little prism light her way, Jinx did know one thing. She was Worthy, because her light made Jinx feel.
~~~~~
It was a month and a half later when Jinx got her chance to be wielded, to be fired by a worthy hand once more.
Jinx knew that her light was supposed to be a Secret. If it were not, she would not conceal it and only show it at night under cloaks and masks and in empty streets and dark alleys. She would not play the part of the demure debutante if her power was allowed to be shown.
So even though Jinx knew that she could defend herself from the group of thugs that cornered her in an alley one night, she also knew that doing so would come with great risk of exposing her Secret. And Jinx couldn’t have that.
And besides. This was what Jinx was created for. To perform the brutish, base violence that Silco shouldn’t have to, to dirty her hands in his stead, to take the brunt and weight and cracks in her soul that came with every snuffed out life. She was shaped and made and sculpted for this purpose; to drown in the blood of her wielder’s enemies so that they could breathe freely.
She only had Zapper, but she doubted she would even need that. These were just a group of lowlife thugs, Zaunites creeping up from the tunnels and sewer passages to prey on hapless Piltovans who made the mistake of being out after sundown while carrying their valuables.
The red fear bled freely from her, and just as she saw a spark of Light in her palm Jinx dropped from the rooftop and curled her arm around the first man’s neck, slamming him to the ground and shattering several bones in his face. While his compatriots were still recovering from the shock Jinx was already moving, a blur of limbs and glowing purple eyes as she cracked skulls and jaws and ribs.
Three of the five men fell before Jinx had her pressed up against the wall of the alley. Jinx was crouched defensively in front of her; purple eyes flaring challenge and ruthless violent intent at the remaining two men.
They looked at their fallen comrades, one of them freely bleeding over the pavement from a shattered nose and the other one groaning in pain as he clutched his stomach. The other one lay completely still, his arm at an awkward, uncomfortable angle as he lay slumped against the wall a few feet away.
Making the smart choice, they turned and ran in opposite directions, leaving bright red panic in their wake. She was about to speak but there was no time. Jinx could hear the rapid approaching footsteps of Enforcers; the commotion must have alerted a civilian who made a call.
In a split second decision Jinx scooped her up in her arms and jumped , her shimmer-empowered legs allowing her to take the weight. She landed hard on the rooftop and began to run, holding her tight against her torso as she made her way to the nearest safe tunnel.
She clung tightly to Jinx, her arms around Jinx’s neck and her face pressed into Jinx’s shoulder.
Jinx could feel her entire body trembling with fear, and knew this was the first time she had seen violence like that up close. Perhaps she had observed it from a distance, perhaps she had heard stories, perhaps she had even seen displays of violence before that were less severe, less brutal.
But this was her first time being so close. Close enough to hear bones breaking and tendons tearing, close enough to hear the retching from the second man when Jinx slammed both fists into his solar plexus. Close enough to see the blood darkening the pavement and close enough to smell the iron in the air.
The tunnel was reached with only a few enforcers close behind. Jinx wasn’t able to be as quiet or as stealthy with the trembling bundle in her arms and knew a few had followed her, but they wouldn’t go into the tunnel. They knew better than that.
She set her trembling form down for only a moment to wrench the grate open before crouching in front of her. Dull gray shock flowed and rolled off of her, with tinges of searing red panic flecked throughout.
“Can you walk?” were the first words Jinx would ever speak to her, spoken in a hushed voice and bleeding more concern and care than Jinx ever thought she was capable of.
“I – I think so,” came the whispered reply. Her voice sounded like lilacs and cool breezes and moonlight filtering in through a window, and Jinx felt her heart shiver.
Jinx spoke no further, only grabbing her wrist and dragging her into the tunnel. She slammed the grate behind her and ran , dragging her along as she heard the swearing voices of the Enforcers stopping outside the tunnel entrance.
But they still ran. Jinx knew the Enforcers weren’t supposed to go into the tunnels, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t . All it took was one hot-headed youth desperate to prove himself or one grizzled veteran who remembered a Time Before and thought of Zaunites as bugs to crush under his heels for them to be pursued.
Incapacitating a few low-level thugs would barely be a blip on their radar. The incident would barely be spoken about after the next twenty-four hours. But if Jinx had to break an Enforcer too? There would be hell to pay, and she would get caught up in it all.
Jinx couldn’t risk that, so she ran, pulling her along behind her.
When the tunnels began to branch, Jinx started weaving through them, slowing down only enough for her to keep her bearings and not stumble or trip on the various lips of rock or exposed piping.
Eventually she slowed down to a walk, knowing that even if an Enforcer had followed, they had left them far behind in the maze. She kept a tight hold on her wrist though as she led her carefully and quietly through the back-tunnels and hidden-ways of Zaun to a safe place, a secure place. One of Jinx’s bolt holes.
It wasn’t much.
A small shack in an old mine-shaft, close enough to the ventilation system that the air was always fresh.
Well.
As fresh as it could get in Zaun.
She had already started coughing, and Jinx knew she needed to move quickly. She pulled her into the shack and set her down on the rough, makeshift bed and started going through a few of her old boxes and chests of things, trying to find – ah. There it is.
“Put this on,” Jinx whispered, pulling out an old re-breather. She quickly dusted it off and inspected it, clearing out the filters as best she could for now. It was old and still a bit dirty but it would do until Jinx could take her to the proper place, Jinx’s proper ‘home’ where all of her newer, better stuff was.
“What is it?” she asked curiously. She was still clearly in shock, matching Jinx’s hushed tones as she still violently trembled, but had a natural curiosity that seemed to break through it. That bright sapphire blue Jinx once knew so well from the Little Man bled through the gray and seemed to briefly smother out the red panic.
“Re-breather,” Jinx murmured, kneeling down in front of her and gently pushing back her hood, exposing medium-length blonde hair that was currently pinned back to keep it inside the hood. Jinx undid the pinnings and let the hair fall free so she could fit the re-breather around it properly, making sure the re-breather would stay fixed onto her face no matter what her hair was doing. “Zaun’s air is toxic. We’re still close enough to the surface that it won’t instantly incapacitate you, but even with this you might still get sick. But it’ll keep you conscious while we keep moving to get to a safer place.”
She blinked.
“It’s okay,” she said carefully. “I – I appreciate you rescuing me, but I need to go back. People will be missing me and – “
That wasn’t acceptable to Jinx. She finally had her , her guiding light was here in front of her and she wanted to leave?
“Why?” Jinx asked, frowning. She had seen her two faces, one face fake and plastic and warped and wrong . That face was the color of Zaun’s rivers, sickly green-and-brown and dead and poison and antithetical to life. Her second face, though, the face that lit the prism and contained the Power and wore a hood and cloak, was the color of sunsets and warm fires and the soft, gentle tones of something just outside of Jinx’s reach, a color and a feeling that she couldn’t put into words just yet.
Why would she want to go back to that first face?
She looked at Jinx with a strange expression.
“I – I have friends, and – and a family to go back to,” she whispered, but Jinx could see the colors flit-flickering across her face. Purple-blue-purple-cyan-purple all bleeding together and flickering and Jinx knew that even she wasn’t sure she was answering Jinx’s question properly. Jinx could see her question sitting uncomfortable in her eyes and mouth and lungs and throat and stomach, curling and setting roots and twisting.
“Do they make you hide your light too?” Jinx asked, her voice barely breath on the air.
She froze up, her eyes going wide and full of red-red- crimson-orange- red-red-red panicfearangerpanicfear, shooting and bleeding off of her face and lingering on her breathing that was rapidly increasing in speed and shallowness.
“How do you – please, please you can’t tell anyone,” she begged, pleaded, the redredredredred panic flooding from her. Her heart must be racing because the redredred panic pulsed with every beat and it was coming faster and faster and faster with every microsecond of Jinx’s silence. “They’ll kill me.”
Jinx didn’t know what to do.
When confronted with the redredred panic and fear of others Jinx was used to feeling elation. Satisfaction. Content in knowing she was achieving her job and striking fear and performing well as a Weapon, as a tool of violence and a specter of Silco’s Fear.
But Jinx didn’t want her to fear. Jinx didn’t know how to stop fear, only how to create it. Silco never told her how to stop fear. Silco never told her how to stop the red.
Yet somehow, curling in wisps and whispers of a hazy quicksilver, someone in Jinx knew. Someone deeply buried in the shattered glass, resting dormant somewhere along the beginning of that jagged fiery line that wrote out Jinx’s pattern, knew.
Something instinctual and smelling of cigar smoke and the faint scent of alcohol, a quicksilver ribbon of something dangerous and buried , long long long since buried , lifted Jinx’s arms and moved her forward, placing her arms around her shoulders and resting Jinx’s chin on her shoulder.
“It’s okay,” Jinx heard herself whisper, not knowing from what cavern inside herself the words had bubbled up from. “It’s okay. I won’t tell. I know it’s a Secret, and I would never tell.”
She was still shaking violently, now both from the dull gray shock and the bright red panic, but Jinx could see the redredred panic slowly seeping away. The cuts and slashes in her that bled panic like blood began to clot and cauterize under Jinx’s arms and the leaking redredred began to evaporate and become replaced with a strange golden haze that Jinx couldn’t quite understand.
But just as the haze appeared it was dashed, replaced with the harsh wooden brown of her first face. Yet this time, there were cracks. Cracks that bled amber and gold in infinitesimally small amounts.
“How did you find out?” she asked, sounding calm and flat. Jinx immediately pulled away, backing away on the floor and crouching, ready to bolt and run and flee because she knew what that meant, that was the voice that meant Jinx had failed and done poorly and was inadequate and would be punished.
But purple eyes met pale blue and Jinx could still see hazy gold leaking through the stiff brown wood of her mask.
“I saw you,” Jinx whispered. “At night. You’re beautiful.”
Her cheeks colored delightfully dark and more cracks appeared in the wooden brown, leaking a little more gold and a few wisps of pink. Jinx didn’t understand what a blush was, she just knew that sometimes people’s faces got colored when they were feeling something strong.
But Jinx didn’t know what gold and pink meant, so she simply kept her wary guard up.
“I – “ she whispered. “I have to go.”
This time, Jinx didn’t feel the same keen sense of loss as when she spoke of leaving the first time. This time, Jinx could feel something else lying underneath the words; colored gold and pink and it was new and interesting and Jinx found herself wound even further in fascination around her.
“Thank you for saving me, but can you please lead me back to Piltover? I should – I really must get back before sunrise,” she said with a deep breath, steadying her tone and her trembling.
Jinx nodded.
This time, she did not touch her . She simply stood and began moving, walking out of the shack and taking a different set of pathways and tunnels and passages. She followed close behind and Jinx led her to a different exit on the other side of Piltover, away from the thugs and Enforcers.
She took off the re-breather and held it out to Jinx.
Jinx shook her head.
“Keep it,” she said quietly. “I don’t need it. It’s yours.”
She blinked hazy gold and pink fog away from her eyes and after a moment of hesitation, nodded before tucking the re-breather into one of the pockets in her cloak. As she was about to leave, she turned around and spoke.
“What’s your name?” she whispered softly.
“Jinx. What’s yours?” Jinx breathed.
If she knew who Jinx was, she didn’t show it. She simply blinked, once, and nodded.
“My...my name is Luxanna Crownguard. But you can just call me Lux. If you like,” she whispered softly.
Lux.
Jinx finally had a name for her light. Lux.
“Lux,” Jinx exhaled.
Lux took a breath and a step back, her cheeks once more coloring. Something about the way Jinx said her name caused a bit more gold and pink to seep from her eyes before she blinked it away.
“Can I see you again?” Jinx asked quietly.
After another few moments of hesitation, Lux nodded once and then was gone; leaving Jinx to close the tunnel behind her.
For the rest of the next day Jinx waited, and ran it all through her mind over and over and over again. The feeling of Lux’s hair on her face. The way her trembling slowly stilled in her arms. The way Lux felt in her arms.
Jinx had never done that before.
Silco had hugged her, a few times.
She could remember a dull, vague sensation of Powder being hugged.
But Jinx had never done that before and she felt her arms itching to do it again. But only to Lux. Never to anyone else. Only her. Only her.
For the rest of the day, Jinx could not stop thinking about the wisps of gold and pink and wondering what they meant.
~~~~~
It was easy to find her again that night.
It was easy to find her again every night, but that night in particular, because Lux almost seemed to be waiting for her.
Jinx arrived on rooftop as she usually did and saw Lux sitting in the usual alleyway she would come out of to begin her nighttime wandering of Piltover. Sometimes Jinx would be early and would have to wait some time before Lux would exit the alley, sometimes Jinx would be late and she’d have to run rooftops searching for that little prism of myriad colors until she found her.
But never had Lux simply sat there, waiting.
And there was no doubt in Jinx’s mind that Lux was waiting for her. How she knew that Jinx followed her nearly every night, Jinx didn’t know. She didn’t care. She just moved quickly and dropped down on the other end of the alley, silently.
Then she reached down and grabbed a small pebble and tossed it, letting it bounce a few times towards Lux.
Lux started slightly and whirled around, and once more pale blue eyes locked contact with glowing purple. Lux’s shoulders relaxed, the brief flash of crimson quickly fading as her surprise faded. Jinx moved closer, slowly at first, then nearly running before stopping only a foot away from Lux.
“...hi,” Lux breathed out quietly.
Jinx just nodded.
Lux stared at her for a few moments longer, once again eyes gently misting with hazy flecks of gold. She then shook her head and it was gone, and she coughed quietly.
“Are you, um...going to follow me again?” Lux asked.
Jinx nodded slowly.
“From a distance again or…?” Lux asked, her voice hesitant.
Jinx shrugged.
Only if you want me to.
She looked pointedly at Lux, who seemed to get the message.
“I think...I think after what happened before, I’d feel safer with you close,” she whispered, and Jinx once again felt her heart shiver and pulse from Lux’s words. Her breath dripped faint pink colors, something about her voice carried the pink with little flecks of gold hidden within.
Jinx couldn’t remember seeing those colors before, but she knew by now that they at least weren’t hostile. So she nodded and took a few steps closer.
After a brief moment of hesitation, where Jinx thought Lux might say something else, she simply turned and began to move through Piltover’s back streets and alleys, looking furtively around her and dodging around any other individuals.
But this time, Jinx was with her.
When Lux made down one alley before spotting a pair of shadowed figures having a hushed conversation, she balked and made to turn and leave. But Jinx put a hand on her shoulder and looked at her, shaking her head slowly and pointing to herself.
I’ll keep you safe. Just go where you want to go.
Lux looked back at her before slowly nodding.
Jinx pulled her hand away and moved in front of Lux, walking through the alley. Lux stuck very close behind her, not quite touching but still very close. The two men in the shadows only looked briefly enough to see purple eyes, then their faces went pale and they quickly looked away.
When they were away from the alley and Jinx once more bade Lux to take the lead, Lux was looking at her with an odd mix of curiosity, awe, and caution. But she didn’t speak and simply began moving again, Jinx following close behind.
Once again they came to an isolated, empty space. Another part of Piltover that was too close to Zaunite tunnels for residents to feel safe, another part of Piltover abandoned. Lux looked hesitantly at Jinx before conjuring up the prism of light in her palm, and Jinx gasped softly.
She’d never seen it so close before.
Now without the need to keep her presence hidden holding her back, she wasted no time in approaching. She cupped her hands under Lux’s own and brought the prism close to her face.
“Careful – “ Lux hissed, making to jerk her hand away but Jinx held fast to her wrist. Her eyes were wide as she took in the little prism of light, cataloging all of its flickering dancing colors from every spectrum imaginable.
Beautiful.
She looked up at Lux and saw her cheeks darkening again and leaking pink mist, and Jinx realized she must have said that out loud. Not that it mattered. Lux’s light was beautiful, and Jinx wanted to look at it forever.
Still holding onto Lux’s wrist, Jinx sat down on the ground and yanked her hand down with her. With a slight yelp of surprise, Lux quickly sat down opposite her and let Jinx continue to manipulate her hand, examining the little prism from every angle.
“How many colors can you make?” Jinx murmured in awe after about five minutes of constant examination.
Lux blinked a few times in confusion.
“Colors?” she asked, frowning. “It’s...it’s just light. I mean, I guess there’s some rainbow-ish colors sometimes but my magic is just light. So it just...looks like light.”
Jinx frowned back at her and slowly shook her head.
“No...no that’s not right,” Jinx muttered, tugging Lux’s hand a bit closer again and getting the prism so close to her face her eyes burned a little from the brightness. “It’s full of colors. Red and green and blue and purple and pink, orange and yellow, all sorts of different shades and hues all...flickering and shifting and moving about. It’s beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Lux just stared at her with a slightly open mouth, cheeks dark and freely spilling pink color all over her, streams and flecks and ribbons of gold strewn throughout it.
“You...you really think my light is...is b-beautiful?” Lux stammered quietly.
Jinx’s eyes snapped up to hers, a deep frown on her face that Lux couldn’t see under the cloth mask, but she could see the confusion in Jinx’s narrowed eyes as Jinx tilted her head slightly to the side.
“Of course I do,” Jinx said, as if it were the most obvious and true thing in the world. “I’ve never made anything like this. My colors are pretty. I like the colors I make. Especially the ones that explode. But I’ve never made anything like this.”
Lux breathed slowly and evenly, and Jinx could feel her hand trembling slightly. The prism flickered softly and Jinx made soft noises to it, gently stroking her fingertips along Lux’s wrist, as close as she could get to the prism without feeling that burning on her skin. Coaxing the prism to stay, soothing it like she might a stray animal.
The whole time Lux just watched her, eyes wide and locked onto Jinx’s hunched and cloaked form, purple eyes wide with wonder as she continued to marvel over the little prism.
“Show me the lightshow again,” Jinx said eagerly after another several minutes, letting go of Lux’s hand and scrambling to sit behind her. She sat close, not touching but close, and practically couldn’t sit still as she waited.
“Th-the what?” Lux asked, trying to turn around to look at Jinx.
“What you did a few weeks ago! That huge blast! Please!?” Jinx asked. It was the most emotion and personality in her voice that Lux had heard so far, and Jinx could tell by the flickering purplecyanviolet that Lux was confused. Those three colors usually meant confused.
“But – that’s dangerous,” Lux hissed. “I could hurt someone. This – this isn’t a toy. This is dangerous and volatile and – and I could get someone killed if I’m not careful.”
“That’s what makes it special though,” Jinx murmured, feeling confused. She knew that Lux’s light wasn’t a toy. Lux’s light was like Jinx. A weapon. Something to be aimed at an enemy or a particularly ugly building to make it stop existing. And Silco said she was special, that she was important and valuable. She was Silco’s weapon and she was special, so Lux’s light was special too.
Lux stared at her over her shoulder for a few moments, varying colors misting and bleeding off of her. The hints of pink and gold that Jinx had begun to put together were two colors reserved for her , so far at least, along with several other colors that Jinx associated with puzzlement and thinking. Purple and cyan and blue, a brighter and cleverer green than the dark green of satisfaction. The deep, mottled maroon of wariness and caution.
Then she nodded slowly and took a breath.
“I suppose I could use the practice,” she murmured softly.
“You don’t need practice Starlight,” Jinx said, leaning forward so her lips were only a few inches away from Lux’s ear. “The light is a weapon. But if you’re afraid of the weapon in your own hands, it will be just as dangerous to you as the people you point it at. You don’t need practice. You need to stop being afraid.”
Lux’s breath caught in her throat as the prism swelled in size, thrumming and pulsing with a heartbeat of its own.
“But I am afraid,” she whispered. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“You can’t control something you’re afraid of,” Jinx murmured. “I learned that years ago.”
Lux was quiet for a few moments before giving a single, slightly shaky nod.
“H-how do I do that? How do I stop being afraid?” she asked, her voice taut and hissing in her throat.
“You embrace it,” Jinx murmured, thinking back to Mylo and Claggor. Voices she hadn’t heard in over a year, two maybe. Since she embraced the pattern. The jagged line. Simply followed and moved, stopped questioning, stopped asking why she was and started accepting what she was.
Lux closed her eyes and took a breath.
The prism swelled and throbbed, color streaming off of it in ribbons. Lux bled red fear but it was tempered a little more than the last time Jinx saw her do this; tempered with wisps of gold and shades of a deep emerald green. Silco was always full of that green, the green of confidence and self-assuredness in himself.
Silco never once doubted himself, never questioned what he was doing.
He simply did.
Lux’s green was not as deep and it wavered and mixed with the red of fear and panic to create a strange contradiction; but the little wisps of gold that Jinx still hadn’t quite figured out curled around the prism as it expanded, allowing it to push further; pulse louder.
Then Lux opened her eyes and Jinx once again saw her two shining stars.
This time, Jinx saw it up close.
This time, the light was even brighter, the smell of ozone snapping into the air heady and thick.
This time, Lux blasted a discarded stone into smithereens.
The ground around the stone was black with soot and even looked slightly melted. Lux winced and hissed slightly, flinching back as soon as the stone burst and Jinx moved on reflex; what reflex, she was unsure, but she certainly didn’t choose to move.
Lux was cupping her own cheek and Jinx carefully moved her hand aside.
She could smell iron.
Two little streaks of pierced skin were etched across Lux’s cheekbone. Thin, but very deep, dripping Lux’s life down her cheek like tears. They glimmered with the thrum of life and Jinx could see the color in them, the color of life. It didn’t have a word, but it was deep and complex and swirling.
Without a thought, Jinx brought her thumb up to her mouth and bit down hard on it, puncturing the skin just enough to cause a bit of her own glimmering, shimmering blood to flow. Before Lux could realize what she was doing, Jinx swiped her thumb quickly across the cuts, smearing the slightest bit of her own shimmered blood into Lux’s own essence.
“What the hell – !?” Lux yelped, wincing backwards and hissing in pain as Jinx’s shimmered blood quickly sealed the wounds shut. It wasn’t enough to change her. Wasn’t enough to mix in her blood like what had happened with Jinx’s own. She might feel a bit funny for a day or two, Jinx thought, but she knew there wouldn’t be any effects beyond that.
Only a slight few flecks of purple appeared in Lux’s pale blue eyes, not enough to notice unless you were as close as Jinx had moved; only a few inches away and looking very closely, knowing exactly what to look for.
“What did you do!?” Lux hissed.
“Fixed you,” Jinx murmured, pulling Lux’s hand away from the scars again and tracing her already-healed thumb across them. “Don’t worry. You won’t be like me. But stone shrapnel has dirt, and dirt means infection if the wound isn’t treated properly. And if you needed to treat the wound properly, they would ask you questions. Questions that you wouldn’t have good answers for.”
Lux just stared at her. The flickering, orange-crimson of anger was seeping from her eyes and the huffing breath out of her nose, but once again little tendrils of gold seemed to temper it down and soon Lux simply sighed heavily, dissipating all of it and evaporating it into the air.
“You’re right,” Lux said quietly. “I don’t know what you did, but...you’re sure there won’t be any side effects?”
“You have two scars,” Jinx said quietly, once again tracing them with her thumb, running the pad of it gently across Lux’s cheekbone. “Like a cat scratched you. They’re thin and white and no one will see unless they are very close.”
“...okay,” Lux whispered. Once again she was misting with pink and gold, but this time she didn’t dispel it immediately. If anything it only grew as she looked at Jinx, who looked away from the scars to meet her eyes. “I...I can just cover it up with makeup. It’s fine.”
Jinx just blinked.
“I don’t know what that is,” she said plainly.
“...you don’t know what makeup is?” Lux asked, the pink and gold quickly disappearing. Electric blue surprise was there instead; a surprise much more pleasant than the red, panicked kind.
Jinx shrugged.
“They don’t have that in Zaun. Whatever it is,” Jinx mumbled. “Or if they do, I’ve never seen it.”
“Oh,” Lux breathed. Once again that pink and gold was there and Jinx was really starting to get annoyed by it. She had no idea what it meant, only that in the weeks of watching Lux beforehand she’d never seen it happen before. She’d never seen it happen with anyone before.
Then there were footsteps nearby and Jinx swore lightly under her breath.
“Patrol. They probably heard the rock shatter. Come on we have to move,” Jinx hissed. She grabbed Lux by the wrist and started dragging her again, and this time Lux followed without hesitation.
~~~~~
The diplomatic corps that Lux was attached to was staying for six more months.
Then she would leave.
Jinx didn’t know how to ask her to stay. How to tell her that she needed to stay with Jinx, to guide her, to wield her. That if she left Piltover, Jinx couldn’t watch over her anymore. Couldn’t keep her safe. Couldn’t help her protect her Secret.
So instead she said nothing and they kept meeting up. It wasn’t every night, but it was most nights, and Jinx started taking Lux into Zaun to practice her light in a place with less eyes and ears that would care about it.
There would still be eyes and ears. This was Zaun , after all. But between Jinx being Jinx, and Lux’s obvious displays of her own power, Jinx highly doubted anyone would make a first move against them unless they were very stupid.
Lux began meeting her outside of one particular tunnel, already wearing her re-breather.
A week later, Jinx presented her with a much nicer one that fit much better and had a filter that wouldn’t need to be changed out. When Lux asked how Jinx knew exactly how to make it fit her face, Jinx told her that she spent enough time staring at it to know it by heart even in her workshop.
That made Lux’s cheeks darken again and caused her to produce more of that blasted pink and gold, which Jinx still hadn’t figured out yet.
The first time Lux showed up at the tunnel wearing the new re-breather, the one Jinx made for her and only her, Jinx felt her heart shudder again.
For the next two months, Lux spent at least half her nights of each week in the care of Jinx, being taken to a new place each time to train. Her control grew, her fear of her own light lessened under Jinx’s gaze. They didn’t speak about themselves, they didn’t exchange anecdotes and stories about their lives, they simply were.
In these ephemeral nights, Jinx and Lux existed as something else entirely; a set of two ghosts that faded in the early morning dew.
In fact, they barely spoke at all. Only a few murmured sentences in greeting and parting, some soft words of reassurance from Jinx when Lux was too afraid that day to try or when she lost control of her light.
They didn’t use names. After that first time, Jinx hadn’t spoken Lux’s again out loud, although she said it often in her mind. It felt too...precious. Like speaking it too many times might cause it to break. Instead, Jinx would occasionally call her ‘Starlight’ when a name of sorts was needed. It would make Lux’s cheeks color a bit and give off a little of that special pink and gold.
And Lux, Lux never said Jinx’s name at all.
Outside of that their communication was silent, sent through locked eyes and soft, feather-light touches on an arm or shoulder.
After that hug in the shack, after Jinx carried Lux tightly to her chest running across rooftops, Jinx didn’t quite know why there was some sort of strange barrier between them. But it was there. Like a little cushion made of air keeping them always at least an inch or two from touching, only allowing the barest contact from time to time.
But Jinx didn’t really pay it much mind. For the first time in years, Jinx had a purpose again. Someone who would make use of her, wield her, take the tool in their hands. She had found someone Worthy and so far had been accepted. Lux hadn’t made use of her as a weapon yet since that first time; hadn’t needed again to tap into her true talents.
That was alright though. Right now Lux needed something else from her, she needed Jinx to teach her how to not be afraid. Jinx could do that. Lux was her guiding light and Jinx would follow her wherever she asked, as long as Lux kept letting her close to her beautiful, ethereal light that set Jinx’s angry, shattered pattern at ease.
Then, one day, Lux brought the outside world into what they were.
They had just sat down on a dry stone, Jinx having found another good place for her to practice where she wouldn’t have to be as careful.
“I’ve heard about you, you know,” Lux said quietly, narrowing her eyes at Jinx. “You were mentioned as part of the security briefing before I was sent here. You’re one of the reasons I have nearly half a dozen guards surrounding me during the day rather than just one or two.”
For a moment, Jinx wasn’t sure what to do. She had assumed Lux knew who she was. It wasn’t like her appearance wasn’t plastered everywhere in Piltover on wanted posters, her purple eyes and blue braids iconic and a symbol of Silco’s Fear.
“And what have you heard about me?” Jinx asked, just as quietly.
“That you’re a terrorist,” Lux said flatly. “A wanted criminal. That you’ve killed dozens, maybe hundreds of people. They called you Silco’s attack dog that went rabid and turned against it’s master.”
“Attack dog makes me sound so pedestrian,” Jinx grumbled.
“You don’t deny it?” Lux asked sharply.
Jinx just shrugged.
“I am what I am, Starlight,” she said quietly. “We all have a purpose in this world. Mine was to be a weapon, a tool for Silco to use to achieve his goals. I was good at it. I was his favorite,” Jinx whispered.
Lux was looking at her oddly, but Jinx didn’t pay her much mind. Her tongue was working on it’s own merits, and she was currently trying to see if she could stop it even if she wanted to.
“He found me when I was very little,” she said quietly. “When I was someone else. He found Powder.”
It was the first time Jinx had said the name out loud in a long, long time. But here, with Lux, it didn’t seize up her chest the way she thought it would, didn’t rip and tear at her guts like it did when Fat Hands shouted it.
“Who was Powder?” Lux asked quietly. Jinx liked the way she said was.
“A coward,” Jinx spat. “A crybaby. A weak, pathetic little thing. Powder was useless. A baby. Powder only lasted as long as she did in Zaun because other people protected her and kept her safe, and how did she repay them?”
Jinx swallowed, a hot, burning feeling behind her eyes.
“She killed them,” Jinx hissed. “Killed the only people who cared. She was so useless and stupid, she never should have tried to help in the first place. Should have let the others take care of it. But because she was so stupid and useless, they all died.”
Something soft and warm covered the back of Jinx’s hand, and she realized that Lux had gently lain her own hand on top.
“So Silco found her and saw how pathetic and useless she was and killed her too,” Jinx murmured, pulling her knees up to her chest. “He killed Powder and made Jinx instead, made her better than Powder. Made her stronger, didn’t let her be a big crybaby like Powder was. Silco sharpened her like steel and taught her how to kill properly. He took what was left of Powder and built it into the greatest weapon Zaun has ever seen.”
Lux’s breathing was shallow, and Jinx could see the crimson-orange anger flaring and pulsing from her. But she didn’t move away, didn’t pull her hand back. Instead Lux just started rubbing her thumb in gentle circles on Jinx’s wrist.
“Jinx wasn’t perfect yet though,” Jinx whispered. “Something was still broken. She couldn’t really accept that Powder was gone. Even though Silco made her better, stronger, sharp and fast and lethal and powerful, Jinx still tried to push back. Couldn’t accept it. And because she was still broken, because there were still little cracks of Powder in there, she did the same thing Powder did.”
Lux shifted a little closer. She gently lifted up Jinx’s hand and pulled it into her lap as Jinx felt her hip bump up against Jinx’s.
“She killed the only person who cared,” Jinx whispered.
The silence dragged on for seconds, then minutes.
After a single, shaky breath Jinx spoke again, firmer and more stable.
“After a few years I had to learn to stop being afraid,” Jinx said quietly. “If I’m afraid of myself I lose control. I had to accept who I am. Who I was. What Silco made me to be.”
She held out a hand in front of her, a hand that had been stained with blood so many times, belonging to so many people, Jinx was a bit surprised it was still able to wash off.
“A weapon,” Jinx said softly. “A tool for violence and killing. That’s what Jinx is. And once I accepted that, once I accepted that path and started walking it wherever it would take me, I had control again. Mylo and Claggor don’t speak to me anymore, because there’s nothing left for them to say.”
Dully, Jinx realized that Lux wouldn’t know who Mylo and Claggor were, but thankfully she didn’t ask. Jinx kept her eyes forward, staring blankly at the wall until she heard a whisper from besides her.
“Jinx? Will you look at me?” Lux whispered softly.
It was the first time she said Jinx’s name, and for a brief moment Jinx was fairly certain her heart was going to stop.
But she turned and faced her guiding light, because she had chosen Lux as her wielder and would do what she asked. Even if Jinx didn’t particularly want to.
A weapon didn’t get to choose what it wanted, after all.
Gold was practically streaming off of Lux now. Gold mixed with the mottled indigo of a deep sadness, a royal blend of hues that drew Jinx in like they had their own form of gravity. Now, even if she wanted to, Jinx doubted she could look away from Lux.
Glinting in her eyes were little sparks and moonbeams as Lux’s light woke up inside of her, stirred by the emotions spilling off of her. Tentatively, Lux lifted a hand and held Jinx’s chin with her thumb and forefinger.
The spot where her skin touched Jinx’s felt warm.
“You aren’t a weapon,” Lux whispered quietly. “You’re a person. What was done to you was wrong.”
Everything inside of Jinx started to move. Twist. Contort. Violent maelstroms and hurricanes began to whip winds of emotion inside of her. Old voices and feelings that Jinx kept long buried, memories and whispers dug sharp knives into every soft part of Jinx’s flesh.
But she couldn’t look away.
Lux had ensnared Jinx with her light months ago and Jinx had only fallen deeper and deeper into the trap. Just as she had once belonged to Silco, Jinx now knew that she belonged to Lux.
Would Lux kill Jinx just as Silco killed Powder?
Would Lux rebuild her into something new, if she didn’t want her to be a weapon anymore?
Could Jinx be anything other than a weapon even if she tried?
“She’s lying,” came a slithering, withering, sliming whisper that Jinx had kept quiet for years.
“Shut up!” Jinx hissed, her hands flying to her skull, her fingers digging hard into her scalp.
“Jinx?” Lux asked, concern. Red began to bleed into the gold and blue, a spot of panic amongst the sadness and the...the…
“He’s back. I have to – have to shut him up,” Jinx muttered, slamming her fist into her head.
“I never left. You know that. Had to keep an eye on you. Had to keep watch. In case you slipped.”
“No no no no no no no,” Jinx said, slamming her fist over and over again into her head until she felt Lux’s fingers grip her wrist.
“In case you forgot what you are .”
“Jinx,” Lux whispered, kneeling down on the floor in front of her. Both of Jinx’s wrists were in Lux’s hands now and she held them fast, even as Jinx flexed against her grip. If Jinx wanted to, she could easily break free with her shimmered strength but Jinx didn’t want to.
She wanted Lux to touch her forever.
So she stared at Lux’s pale blue eyes flicked with faint specks of purple, her breath coming in rattling heaves as the whispers slithered further in her ears, wormed into her brain and yanked her down from the two guiding stars and made her stare at the broken, shattered pattern beneath her feet.
“I killed them,” Jinx whispered, horror and fear and pain dripping from her voice. “I killed them all. I’m a Jinx. I always have been. I can’t be anything else.”
She had to push it away. Had to make it quiet or she’d lose control again. She knew what she was, she knew what she’d always be. If she could get Lux to see it, to understand, there wouldn’t be a problem. She could be Lux’s weapon. She would be happy being Lux’s weapon. She’d come back to Demacia with her.
Jinx would keep her safe. Noxus wasn’t a stranger to assassins. A few of the Chembarons had run-ins with them once or twice. Lux could be a target, someday. But Jinx could protect her. She could kill whoever Lux needed her to kill; that was her job, that was what she was best at.
But Lux needed to understand. Because if she didn’t, if she kept trying to say otherwise, Jinx would lose control and she couldn’t let what happened to Silco happen to Lux.
Not her.
Never her.
I’ll kill myself before I let that happen.
Jinx could never snuff out that light.
That beautiful, ethereal, soul-soothing light.
“Jinx…” Lux breathed softly. “I’m...I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Jinx stopped.
Everything about Jinx stopped.
...
Nobody had ever said sorry to Jinx before. Not like that.
Fat Hands said ‘sorry’ like that to Powder.
But Powder was dead.
Lux said it to Jinx.
Mylo hadn’t known what to say to that either. He had gone quiet again and Lux hadn’t tried to push any further after Jinx had simply stared at her in stunned silence for well over ten minutes. Once she was sure Jinx had calmed down and wasn’t going to keep hitting herself she gingerly released her wrists.
Jinx felt the loss of contact immediately and keenly, but couldn’t make herself move. Or speak.
Lux took a few cautious steps backwards and took a deep breath before sitting down to meditate and begin her exercises. But she kept it small and didn’t stop looking at Jinx occasionally, always kept Jinx in her line of sight.
Jinx just stared.
Instead of sending out beams of light and prisms that would explode into delightful cacophonies of color, Lux did something different this time. She concentrated, hard, and sent little floating prisms of light towards Jinx before letting them burst in tiny, controlled explosions of light. Never too close to Jinx’s face, not close enough to hurt her or even touch her, but she seemed to just know.
She knew the effect her light had on Jinx and was using it to her advantage, surrounding Jinx with the soothing, ethereal flashes of her light.
It worked, too.
An hour later Jinx was able to move again.
A little later after that it was time for Lux to return to Piltover, and Jinx escorted her as she always did. When they reached the exit, Lux hesitated.
Then in a whirl of limbs and hair she whipped around and pulled Jinx into an impossibly tight hug before letting go. It all happened so fast that Jinx barely had time to blink before Lux sprang backwards and opened the exit.
“See you soon,” Lux whispered, her gaze lingering on Jinx for a moment longer before disappearing into Piltover.
She had been covered in a golden mist ever since saying Jinx’s name, but in the moment she left, the gold was so bright and lingering Jinx was almost certain Lux had left a little of her own light behind.
~~~~~~~
They didn’t talk about it again.
They went back to barely speaking with words.
But now Lux said Jinx’s name a little more often.
She would reach out and touch her a little more often.
She would sit a little closer.
And the whole time Lux would be with her, Jinx had a hard time seeing any other color than gold coming off of her.
~~~~~~~
Some time later, Lux had unpleasant news. She would have to cease, or at least severely cut down on, her nighttime escapades and training of her light with Jinx. People close to her in the diplomatic corps had begun to notice her absence from her rooms at night, and she’d received a lot of strong words scolding and chiding her about safety.
Lux, of course, couldn’t just tell them that she was probably safer than anyone else in Piltover or Zaun because of who was with her, so she had to placate them. She managed to sneak out one more time, far later than usual because she had to make sure everyone was asleep, and couldn’t stay long.
Jinx didn’t know what to think or feel when she told her.
“But you only have a month and a half left,” Jinx whispered dully.
“I know,” Lux replied, looking torn.
Will you stay?
Will you take me with you?
If I follow you there anyway will you let me close?
All questions Jinx didn’t ask, and Lux didn’t answer.
“I’m sorry,” Lux whispered after a few long moments of silence.
“For what?” Jinx asked quietly. She had never been able to see her own colors but she wished now more than ever that she could, because she didn’t know what she was feeling. She didn’t know what was happening inside of her.
“I…” Lux said, breath hitching and words catching in her throat.
Jinx should have known.
Everything changes.
Everything is fluid.
Nothing is stable.
No one is safe.
“You should go,” Jinx murmured. “I don’t want you to get in trouble again on my account.”
“But – Jinx, I…” Lux stammered.
Jinx looked at her.
She looked at those pale blue eyes, pale blue with those ever so faint flecks of Jinx’s own glowing purple. They hadn’t faded; not even a little bit. In the pitch-black of some of Zaun’s tunnels, Jinx could even see their faint glow.
Only when she was close, very close, but it was still there.
A little bit of Jinx inside of her guiding light; her chosen wielder.
A wielder who was now abandoning her.
Lux didn’t finish her sentence. She simply reached out and brushed her fingertips against Jinx’s arm before turning and leaving.
She left behind a deep indigo blue with flecks of gold.
~~~~~~~
In the two years since Lux’s departure from Piltover, Demacia had sent two more diplomats. But this time instead of sending an entire group, they would only send one or two accompanied by a contingent of guards.
Each time Jinx would watch for Lux.
Each time she was disappointed.
The stories about her began to fade away and replaced with rumors about where she’d gone. She was no longer Silco’s weapon to be directed towards his enemies, nor was she a weapon unchained and lashing out indiscriminately wherever her whims took her.
Lux might not be here but that didn’t make Jinx any less hers. And Lux hadn’t pointed her at anyone, so Jinx had nothing to do but wait.
Rumors began to spread that she had died. That one of the Chembarons had finally done away with her in secret. The Chembarons, of course, spread opposing rumors that the Enforcers had done the job themselves and were keeping it quiet; not wanting to make a martyr out of Jinx.
Jinx just kept herself quiet.
A few people knew the truth. Some of it, at any rate. They knew that Jinx was alive and laying low, but not why or what happened to her to cause the drastic shift in behavior. They would sell her food and give her little odd jobs to do, but she would refuse to do any errands that involved violence.
Only one person could demand violence from her and she wasn’t here to do it.
So instead Jinx sold information. Acted as a courier. Jobs that relied on her stealth, her unique affinity for the back-tunnels and hidden secrets of Zaun, her ability to stay unseen. Except instead of using it to evade authorities and set something to explode or assassinate a target, she was simply using it to evade everyone and everything and do the job.
Then, one day, two-and-three-quarter years after Lux left indigo and gold in her wake, another Demacian diplomat group came to Piltover. And this one, this one was different.
Jinx was there, of course. Watching from a rooftop, a pair of binoculars in her hand.
The first thing she noticed was the guards. The number of them, specifically.
There were a lot of them.
The Demacians still insisted on arriving through horse-drawn carriages and carts, despite almost all other travel in and out of Piltover happening via airship or hexgate; or both. And one of them was surrounded by armored guards and looked very fancy.
The first person out of that carriage was a large, stocky man with pauldrons nearly as big as his head. Jinx snorted and mumbled something crass under her breath about it as the serious-faced man looked around, a massive sword on his back. Jinx wondered if it was just for show. There was no way a sword that big was actually practical.
The next person out of the carriage was –
Jinx saw the blonde hair first, and her heart nearly stopped.
She looked different.
She looked good.
Her face was regal and sharp. The soft, round, girl-ness of her face had worn away in the nearly-three-years and was now unmistakably the face of a powerful, self-assured young woman. She wore armor too now. Nothing nearly as bulky as the massive man besides her or the guards surrounding her; merely a simple breastplate, adorned with a few strips of deeply-dyed fabric.
But what Jinx noticed most was the stave she held in her right hand. There was a gemstone of some sort set into the top, and it gleamed.
Lux and the man Jinx assumed must be the brother, Garen, moved to approach the members of Piltover’s council that had come to greet them. Hands were shaken, and Lux smiled a pretty smile. Even from this distance, where Jinx normally couldn’t see them, she could see Lux’s colors.
And once again, she was full of the wooden brown that denoted the mask she once wore.
That wasn’t Jinx’s Lux. That was the other one.
Jinx frowned.
After watching for a few moments longer she disappeared. There was no way she would be able to get close without being spotted, not in broad daylight and with all those guards swarming around Lux.
But her and Lux had never met in daylight hours anyway.
So Jinx waited.
And soon night fell and she covered herself in cloak and cloth mask, and made her way to their exit. Their meeting place.
A place she hadn’t been to since she last saw it through a haze of indigo and gold.
~~~~~
Sunset came and went, and Lux did not show.
Jinx wasn’t really expecting her to.
Another hour passed, and then another.
But still Jinx waited.
When the sun slowly began to peek over the horizon Jinx left. Lux hadn’t shown, but Jinx wasn’t disheartened or disappointed.
She would wait again.
As long as she needed to.
She would wait forever for her guiding light.
~~~~~~~
It took a month and a half.
A month and a half of sleeping through the day and waiting through the night, of watching and waiting and trying not to think of indigo-dyed hues and brilliant sparkling golds. But Jinx didn’t miss a single night. She waited, and watched.
And then a month and a half of waiting later, when the moon had reached its peak in the night sky, Jinx saw movement outside the entrance. She folded herself into the darkness, pressing against the wall and crouching low.
The entrance opened.
Jinx exhaled slowly and silently, not moving a muscle as she held her breath.
A shadowed figure stepped in through the entrance, closing it behind them. Darkness covered the tunnel, the only light coming from a few flickering moonbeams making their way through the small holes and cracks in the entryway.
Jinx could hear them moving.
Then, oh then, a miracle happened.
The tunnel lit with a swarming symphony of colors and Jinx gave a choked gasp. Her throat and her chest swelled and she moved, moved before she even knew what she was doing. The shadowed figure moved too the moment she was spotted, shedding their hood and ripping off their mask to reveal a shock of blonde hair.
Bodies crashed together as hands scrambled for purchase. The light didn’t disappear, the single prism that was its source was floating of its own volition close to the ceiling as Jinx’s fingers flexed on the rough fabric of the cloak she was grabbing onto, trying to find purchase as arms encircled her and squeezed her tightly, hands unable to decide between holding onto Jinx’s head or roaming along her back.
A breathy, incredulous laugh echoed through the tunnel.
Jinx closed her eyes and listened to it.
“You’re here. You – you waited for me...” came a slightly wet sounding whisper. The voice was shocked, incredulous, and also...joyful. Jinx hadn’t ever really heard joy before, she thought, but somehow she knew what it sounded like. “I thought for sure I’d have to come find you. I – I heard you were dead but I didn’t really believe it.”
“I saw you arrive. I’ve been waiting since that first night. I’ll always wait for you,” Jinx whispered.
The arms around her squeezed her even tighter, somehow, for a brief few moments before they loosened and Jinx felt the torso she was holding onto move away. Jinx made a soft noise of protest but allowed the loss of contact.
Her reply was a giggle as she felt slender fingers move to her face, holding her head.
“Jinx,” came the whisper. “Look at me.”
“What if I open my eyes and you aren’t real?” Jinx whispered, feeling slightly afraid. “I’ve seen things before. What if it’s happening again?”
“It’s okay,” came the soothing voice. “It’s okay. I’m real. I’m here. I came back for you.”
I came back for you.
Jinx opened her eyes and was met with pale blue ones.
Pale blue with flecks of slightly gleaming purple.
“Lux?” Jinx whispered.
“Jinx,” Lux murmured, smiling wide. A real smile.
And she was practically glowing golden.
Jinx hesitantly reached her hand out. Her fingertips made contact with Lux’s face, seeking out her right cheekbone. Lux didn’t even flinch at the contact, and even leaned slightly into Jinx’s touch. Carefully, Jinx swiped her thumb a few times over the skin and saw the two, thin white scars.
“It’s you,” she whispered. “You’re really here.”
“I’m sorry it took so long to come back,” Lux breathed quietly. “At first my parents simply didn’t see a good reason to send me back to Piltover, saying that my work was done and that continuing to stay was a waste when I could be better used elsewhere. And...well, then something else happened. People found out about – about my light.”
“Are you alright?” Jinx asked, remembering how desperate Lux had been to keep her secret before.
“Yes. Now that you’re here,” Lux whispered. “I wasn’t, for a while. At first I didn’t really understand. I didn’t want to think about you at first, you felt...you felt almost like a dream. Honestly there was a point where I was rather certain I had made you up but...you kept crawling back into my mind and I couldn’t get away.”
“Oh,” Jinx said quietly. Was that a bad thing? Usually when someone wouldn’t leave Jinx’s mind it was a bad thing.
“Then of course I, ah...well, had some thinking to do,” Lux murmured, amused about...something. Jinx wasn’t sure what. “And once I had done that thinking and accepted that my thoughts about you weren’t going to go away anytime soon, I kept trying to come back to you.”
“I waited,” Jinx said. She didn’t really know what else to say, what she could say.
“I hoped you would,” Lux chuckled awkwardly. “Is that selfish of me?”
Jinx shrugged.
“I chose you,” she said simply. “I’m yours. You can be as selfish as you like.”
She had never really put it in words before. Words were never Jinx’s strong suit. She preferred actions. She had tried to show Lux that she was hers now, that Lux could be Silco’s successor in the only way that mattered to Jinx.
But she had never said the words out loud.
Lux’s cheeks colored again at that statement, but not nearly as dark as they once did when Jinx spoke about her. Jinx still didn’t know what that meant, but she gathered that from Lux it was a positive thing.
“As selfish as I like?” Lux whispered.
Jinx nodded.
So Lux moved in close. Her face was right in front of Jinx’s, and Jinx could feel her soft breath on her face. It made her heart seize up a little bit but not out of fear or panic but something else entirely.
“If I can be as selfish as I like,” Lux murmured. “Then…”
Jinx had received a hug before. Powder had received a lot of hugs.
But Jinx had never been kissed before.
She knew the mechanics of it, sort of. She saw a lot of people do it in Zaun. But she’d never had much of a desire to do it herself. She didn’t really see the point of getting your mouth all over someone else’s and thought it was kinda gross.
But that was before Lux kissed her.
When Lux kissed her; slotting her lips perfectly against Jinx’s own with a soft purr of contentment, Jinx understood.
Jinx’s eyelids fluttered shut as she allowed herself to be kissed. She didn’t really know what she was doing or how to kiss back yet, but she moved her hand to lightly rest on the back of Lux’s head. Lux made another soft noise that had Jinx’s heart racing, and she felt herself stumble backwards until her back hit the wall of the tunnel.
Lux didn’t miss a step and Jinx felt her torso press flush up against her, breaking the contact of their lips only briefly to breathe in before kissing her again.
Jinx lost count after the fifth one.
Some amount of time later Lux pulled away and didn’t come back for another. She didn’t step away but she pulled her head back and held Jinx’s chin in her thumb and forefinger, seeking out and finding Jinx’s eyes with her own.
Jinx was panting slightly, but she didn’t notice.
“Was...that kind of selfish alright?” Lux murmured.
Gold dripped from her words and skin and all Jinx could do was nod.
“Good,” Lux sighed in relief. “And...just so you know, I’m not just – this isn’t just some – some physical fantasy I’m fulfilling.”
Jinx didn’t know what that meant, but she just nodded. She’d probably nod to anything Lux said right about now.
“I care about you,” Lux continued, her voice soft. “You – you matter. To me. Okay?”
That...that wasn’t right.
Jinx wasn’t supposed to matter. Not – not like that.
She waited.
She waited for Lux to correct herself, to say that Jinx was important to her plans or that she needed Jinx to do something for her, but Lux said nothing of the sort. Just kept looking deeply into Jinx’s eyes, leaking and spilling golden color.
Then Jinx waited for Mylo. He would always chime in when Jinx got any thoughts about actually being important or mattering to someone.
But he, too, was silent.
“I – “ Jinx said, throat dry.
Indigo began to color the gold spilling from Lux as her eyes softened and lips parted slightly, a new understanding dawning in her eyes.
“Oh, Jinx…” she murmured. “It’s okay. I remember the story you told me. About Silco, and what he did to Powder. This...this is new to you, isn’t it? You have no idea what I’m talking about?”
“I’m sorry,” Jinx whispered, her voice hoarse.
“No – no I’m the one who’s sorry,” Lux sighed, leaning forward and resting her head on Jinx’s shoulder. “I had all these – these thoughts about seeing you again, I didn’t even think...stupid.”
“You’re not…” Jinx mumbled.
Lux wasn’t stupid.
Lux was her light.
“I am. I got all these thoughts and ideas, and you said so many lovely and kind things to me,” Lux whispered. “I think I fell in love with you a little bit that first day to be honest and even after everything you told me I didn’t even consider that you might not even know what that means.”
Love.
Jinx started violently trembling.
“Jinx?” Lux asked, worry leaking into her voice in mottled copper-reds.
“You...y-you what?” Jinx whispered, feeling her legs give up as she slid down to the floor of the tunnel.
Lux sat down with her and she looked at Jinx’s face, meeting her eyes.
The copper-red worry and indigo sadness were swept away by a torrent of gold flooding out from Lux. So much gold Jinx wondered if it would flood the tunnel and sweep them away too, and something felt heavy and tight against her chest.
“I love you, Jinx,” Lux whispered, reaching up to brush her knuckles softly against Jinx’s cheek. “I’ve loved you since you told me you thought my light was beautiful.”
Gold.
Gold is love.
Gold is love and love is gold and Lux is gold when she looks because Lux loves –
“But you can’t love me,” Jinx whispered in horror. “I’m – I – I’m a monster. A jinx. I ruin everything, I break everything. Everything dies around me.”
“But I can,” Lux said softly, a few tears leaking out down her cheeks. “I can, and I do. Even if you’re a jinx, you’re my Jinx, aren’t you? Isn’t that what you said?”
She did say that.
But that’s – that’s not what she meant.
...was it?
Jinx looked up at the prism of light still illuminating the tunnel. The symphony of colors was even brighter than she’d ever seen before. She could tell, she could see it in the prism, in the colors of the light.
Lux wasn’t afraid anymore.
Did she do that?
Did Jinx teach her to not be afraid?
Was that...love?
The light really was so beautiful.
“Your Jinx,” she whispered quietly. “But what if I hurt you?”
“Then we’ll fix it,” Lux murmured.
“What if I break stuff again?” Jinx whispered.
“We’ll fix that too,” came the firm reply. “You won’t do it on purpose, right?”
Jinx slowly shook her head.
“Not – not unless you ask me to,” she whispered. “You wield me. You tell me where to go and who to hurt and I’ll do it, but only if you ask me.”
Lux smiled softly and leaned in, pressing a gentle kiss to Jinx’s forehead.
“That’s the thing, Jinx,” she murmured softly against Jinx’s skin. “I won’t ask you to. I would only want you to hurt someone if they’re trying to hurt us first.”
I won’t ask you to.
“Why?” Jinx asked, feeling like she couldn’t breathe, like she was gasping for air. “That – that’s all I’m – I’m good for. That’s why he made me.”
“Because you don’t do that to people you love,” Lux murmured. “Sometimes you hurt them by accident and that’s okay, as long as you’re sorry and you do your best to make it better, but you never ever hurt them on purpose like that. You never use them.”
The shattered pattern beneath Jinx’s feet was hot and burning as it collapsed in on itself underneath her. It was warped and scattered and it had abandoned her before but it had never imploded like this, and Jinx felt as if her mind were about to follow it.
She found her hands clinging to Lux like a lifeline, and Lux wrapped her arms around her and pulled her close.
“I’ve got you,” Lux murmured softly. “I’ve got you.”
~~~~~
Lux’s mission to Piltover was shorter than before. She only had two weeks left.
When she told Jinx that two days later, it hurt, but Lux quickly realized what was going on and hurried to clear up the misconception.
“No! No no, I’m not leaving you,” Lux said hurriedly. They were in Jinx’s proper home now. Lux had actually asked to see it herself, to see Jinx’s workshop.
When she had shown up earlier that night wearing her re-breather, Jinx had been full of the oddest sensation. She wanted to rip that re-breather off of Lux’s face, but only so she could kiss her.
That was new.
She didn’t, of course. Jinx was still figuring out a lot of stuff. Lux hadn’t kissed her again in the past two days either, and Jinx wasn’t quite sure why, but Lux didn’t seem to be too eager to leave anytime soon so she wasn’t too worried that it was a bad thing.
“Oh,” Jinx said, frowning. She pulled her knees up to her chest and leaned back against the rock wall of her ‘home’.
“I – I wanted to ask you to come with me,” Lux said quietly. “Demacia is aware of your – um – reputation in Piltover and what you’ve done, but I...okay, please don’t be mad at me?”
Jinx was pretty sure being mad at Lux would be impossible but she gave her a nod of reassurance anyway.
“I told Garen I met you,” Lux blurted out, looking sheepish. She was streaming off that funny pink color again that Jinx hadn’t really figured out what it meant. “Everything. I was – I was trying to sort out my feelings, and Garen had spotted me practicing with my light and I had started crying because I remembered how much you loved watching me practice and the things you would say about it and – well – one thing led to another and I was spilling my guts out to him.”
Lux was looking quite firmly at the ‘floor’ now and wouldn’t meet Jinx’s eyes. Squirming uncomfortable, she seemed to be waiting for Jinx to say something.
“Okay,” Jinx said quietly.
“...you aren’t mad?” Lux whispered, blue-and-red flowing off her; surprise tinged with a tiny bit of panic.
Jinx shrugged.
“You’re here,” she said simply. “Whatever happened to get you here doesn’t matter much to me. I think.”
“Oh,” Lux said, her voice small. “That’s – okay. That makes me feel better. I told Garen your story and that you seemed – that you seemed, um, attached to me. And I may have confessed that I grew my own feelings for you during the six months we spent together. I wasn’t – I didn’t know if you reciprocated but I knew you – I mean I hoped – that you felt some measure of...of kind disposition and attachment to me. I told him that even if you – even if you did bad things I didn’t think you were a bad person. And – well – I…”
Lux rubbed the back of her head awkwardly as Jinx watched her babble, bemused.
“I may have done some research about you,” she muttered. “...a lot of it. And I realized how young you were. Because I did the math with Silco’s rise to power and – and the stories about you, and what you told me about him finding you when you were little and I realized...he basically brainwashed you.”
Jinx blinked.
“He – Silco cared about me,” she whispered, shrinking back a little.
“I’m not saying he didn’t, in his...in his own way,” Lux sighed, pushing her hands through her hair. “But I’ve read the stories about him, Jinx. He was...horrible. The things he did to people…”
She knew that.
She knew that Silco had done bad things. He hurt people.
But wasn’t it all for Zaun? To make a strong Zaun, one that could break itself free from Piltover’s yoke?
Then why the Shimmer?
Jinx held up her own hand and looked at it. She couldn’t see it now but she knew if she sliced her palm open, her blood would flow and it would be mixed with the shimmering, glimmering substance that turned her into what she is now.
No.
The Shimmer didn’t do that.
Silco did that.
The Shimmer just put a bow on top.
“It’s okay,” Lux whispered softly, hesitantly reaching a hand out and resting it on Jinx’s knee. “I – I know you cared about him too. I’ve read the accounts from – from others, I know how...devoted you were to him, and I’m sure you really did care and that he – that he cared about you. In his way. But…”
“I don’t think Silco cared about anything other than his own ambition, in the end,” Jinx murmured softly, staring at her hands.
It was different, saying it out loud.
It was something Jinx was sure she had known somewhere, somehow, for a long time. Silco cared about her, yes, but she was a means to an end. He cared about her but his ability and the limits of his care were tempered by his own ambition, his own desire.
“ You don’t do that to people you love.”
Silco cared about her.
But Silco didn’t love her.
Jinx had been doing a lot of thinking about that word, love, in the past forty-eight hours. Tossing and turning. Wracking her brain as broken memories shifted through her broken pattern, sifting grains of sand through a cracked sieve.
One name stuck in her like a bullet next to her heart, throbbing painfully with each beat.
Vander.
Lux exhaled softly and gave Jinx’s knee a reassuring squeeze.
“He’s gone, now,” Lux murmured. “You don’t have to be what he made you anymore. Not if you don’t want to. I meant what I said back then. You are not a weapon you are a person. A very...damaged, and broken person, but a person. A person who can heal.”
Could she?
“Am I supposed to be Powder again?” Jinx whispered harshly, her eyes stinging and burning with shimmered tears.
Lux shook her head, misting indigo sadness.
“No,” she murmured softly. “Powder is gone. I don’t know much about her, aside from what you told me. That she was scared, and she cried a lot. But I do know she’s gone. You can’t be Powder again, even if you wanted to be. But Jinx can heal. You can’t ever be Powder again. Even if you decide to stop being Jinx, you can’t. Not really. But you can always heal and change and grow. You don’t have to stay this version of Jinx forever.”
That.
That was why Lux was Worthy.
Fat Hands and the time-skipping Firefly wanted Powder back. Fat Hands thought she was still there, somewhere, and the Firefly knew she was dead and gone but saw Jinx as an irredeemable monster and wanted her dead.
She agreed with him, once.
But just because she agreed with him didn’t mean she was going to let him do it.
Lux, though.
Lux didn’t want Powder. Lux didn’t know Powder. Lux knew that Powder can’t come back. She didn’t think Jinx wouldn’t bring her back, she knew just as well as she did that Powder couldn’t.
But Lux saw Jinx. She wanted Jinx. She said Jinx could heal. Not to be Powder again, but to be Jinx. A different kind of Jinx, but still Jinx. Or maybe someone new altogether, but Lux didn’t seem to care. She wasn’t trying to make Jinx stop being Jinx, she just wanted Jinx to be...more.
“What if I can’t be fixed?” Jinx mumbled.
Lux shook her head.
“It’s not about fixing,” she hummed softly. “Healing isn’t fixing. Not always. Like you healed my cheek when the rock cut me, I still have those scars.”
“I’m sorry,” Jinx whispered.
“No,” Lux said firmly. “No. Don’t you dare apologize for that. I had to be without you for nearly three years and those scars and the little specks of purple you left in my eyes were all I had of you. I’m glad for them.”
“...oh,” Jinx whispered, feeling something very strange happening in her stomach.
“Scars are just evidence of the hardships we’ve endured, a reminder of the past,” Lux said, her voice softer now. “Physical or mental. Not all scars are bad. Not all scars are good. Some scars are neither one, they just are. They make you different, but you can decide for yourself what that means. I don’t want to fix you, I want you to stop being afraid.”
The strange feeling burst into her chest now, seizing it up and making it a bit hard to breathe.
“But I did stop,” Jinx said, confused. “I – I stopped. I’m a weapon. I stopped being afraid of it.”
Lux shook her head.
“No, you didn’t,” she whispered. “You just paved it over with something else. You unpersoned yourself so you wouldn’t have to be afraid, because a weapon isn’t supposed to be afraid right?”
Jinx nodded jerkily.
“But if you’re a person again and not a weapon, that makes you afraid. You never stopped being afraid, Jinx, you just stopped thinking of yourself as a person. I don’t want to fix you. I want to help you be a person again, without being afraid.”
~~~~~~~
To her credit, Jinx didn’t blow up the entire fissure.
Just a lot of it.
Lux had simply sat, her back pressed against the rock wall as Jinx hurled bomb after bomb into the fissure, screaming and shouting and sobbing until her entire supply was exhausted and several new craters had been ripped into the sides of the rock.
There had been a few moments where an explosion had rocked the fissure hard enough that Lux had briefly panicked about a cave-in, but that was all.
After all the bombs, after all the screaming and crying, Jinx simply collapsed into a ball. On her side, with her knees up to her chest and her arms wrapped tightly around her legs, forehead pressed tightly onto her knees.
Lux had approached her then, a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“Come to Demacia with me,” she murmured softly. “Nobody has to know who you are except me, Garen, and a few others. I need a new personal guard anyway, my last one tried to peek on me while I was changing.”
That got Jinx moving. She shot to her feet with an angry glare, looking furtively around for another bomb.
Lux just laughed.
“No, you can’t kill him,” she said softly, moving to Jinx’s side and looping her arm around Jinx’s elbow. “But you can take his place. Keep me safe. Ward off Noxian assassins and other various ne’er-do-wells.”
Jinx took a breath. She closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see the colors right now, didn’t want to see Lux’s gold streaming off of her in ribbons and waves. She wanted to think.
“Stay with me,” Lux whispered.
A long, long exhale.
“Always,” Jinx whispered back.
~~~~~~~~~~
In the years to come
~~~~~~~~~~~
Jinx was successfully smuggled back to Demacia and given a bit of a makeover. She was allowed to keep the hair, although she got multiple requests to at least consider dying it when accompanying Lux outside of Demacia as it was rather eye-catching.
There wasn’t much they could do about her eyes, though. But they proved to be a boon. Even without her reputation, her eyes unnerved and intimidated every Demacian she came across except Lux, and her Aunt Tianna; one of the few people to know Jinx’s real identity.
Tianna Crownguard was also one of the few people to ever truly scare Jinx. Something about the way she carried herself reminded her almost a little too much of Silco, and Jinx endeavored to avoid every possible situation where she would be forced to interact with the woman whenever possible.
At first Jinx had been isolated from Lux and been put through a whole week of interrogation at Tianna Crownguards hands, attempting to see if she was working for Noxus to assassinate Tianna’s niece, apparently. Jinx though the whole idea was absurd and said as much several times, but Lux had coached her repeatedly on what Tianna would need to hear in order to let Jinx walk free.
Lux had already done the work of telling Jinx’s story to her Aunt. After getting more details from Jinx over their remaining time in Piltover and Zaun, which consisted of a few harrowing, flashback-filled nights for Jinx that were only soothed by Lux’s embrace and several floating prisms of light for Jinx to stare at, Lux had provided the full report to her Aunt.
What Jinx didn’t know was that Lux had independently verified much of what Jinx already told her through her own methods. That was why it took a little over a month to go to their spot to meet her in the first place. Lux had been gathering information on Silco and Jinx, trying to see for herself what the real story behind it all was.
What she found and uncovered about the history of Zaun, the many riots and the oppressive crushing boot Piltover had pressed down several times before Silco’s rise, what she discovered about Vander and, of course, Powder. All of it given to her Aunt.
She also found Violet. But Lux had no real desire to speak to her, based on everything she knew about her so far. While the information she’d be capable of giving would be monumental, Lux also gathered that she would be a massive roadblock in relocating Jinx.
Garen and Tianna both still felt that Jinx deserved to serve some sort of penance for her actions, but when Lux asked if Demacia was suddenly in the business of prosecuting Piltover’s criminals for them, they both clammed up. Lux was given stern words, from both of them, that if Jinx slipped and broke Demacian laws there’d be hell to pay and Lux would bear some of that responsibility; but she stood fast.
So after a week, Jinx walked as a free woman in Demacia; whereabouts totally unknown to Piltover and Zaun, and her identity only known by a few individuals within the Crownguard family. Her cover story was a blend of the truth and a bit of falsehood; Lux used the story of Jinx saving her from the group of thugs in the alley but instead of portraying her as Jinx, the terrorist and criminal, simply portrayed her as a Zaunite who went out of her way to save an innocent woman’s life and asked for nothing in return.
Lux, clearly very moved by the event, never forget the young Zaunite woman who saved her and when she returned to Piltover nearly three years later, sought her out and offered her a ticket out of Zaun.
No Demacian who knew anything about Zaun would expect it to be rejected.
Jinx thought that was absurd, because Zaunites hated ‘traitors’ with a passion and had a lot of pride in where they came from, but then again it wasn’t like she was going to Piltover. So maybe that was different. All she knew was that she certainly would have rejected it if that was actually what happened, and if it were anyone other than Lux who was offering.
She wasn’t doing this to get away from Zaun, she was doing it to follow Lux.
This line of thinking started making Jinx feel very uncomfortable about Fat Hands and Hat Lady.
They tried to train her in traditional Demacian fighting styles with swords and armor but Jinx hated every second of it and only lasted a month before she challenged any walking tin-can who wanted a piece of her to just try and get some and she’d show them how much their stupid metal hats and pointy metal rods really mattered to her.
After flattening a whole group of five trained swordsman with only a few nicks and cuts to speak of, Jinx was deemed capable of guarding the Lady Luxanna with her own skills. However, after much coaxing from Lux (which may or may not have involved a confession that she found it attractive) Jinx did agree to at least learn how to use a sword and wear one when she was ‘on duty’. She chose a thin blade, light and not very cumbersome, and didn’t really understand what it meant when Lux said it made her look very dashing but she knew it was a good thing and caused a lot of gold color (and a very deep pink color) to come flowing off of her, so Jinx kept wearing it.
Jinx had learned that gold meant love and soon she would learn that pink meant attraction.
That was a fun learning experience.
Of course, that aspect had to be kept a secret. Even from Tianna. The only person who knew just how deep the bond between Lux and Jinx would grow was Garen, her older brother, and he wasn’t very happy about it.
But he kept their secret and protected them, even if he never kept his dislike of Jinx much of a secret.
She took a new name, too. She kind of had to, actually, because the blue hair and purple eyes were hard enough to explain away already but the name Jinx still being attached to her would be a bit too much coincidence.
Lux still used the name in private. She said she’d use it forever until Jinx told her that she wasn’t Jinx anymore, but the way she said it made Jinx never want to change it. She had first chosen the name because she was unlucky, a jinx, she got people hurt, she got people killed.
But soon it was her name because it was the name Lux murmured in the privacy of her (their, really) bedroom, the name Lux breathed in her ear when she came apart beneath her, the name she whispered with love and reverence.
No, Jinx was perfectly happy keeping her name and using a pseudonym in public.
All in all it was a rather successful extrication of Jinx from the City of Tomorrow and its shadowed twin sister, which made it all the much more a shame when it all came crashing down in three years.
~~~~~~~
And no, this time it wasn’t Jinx’s fault. She didn’t blow anything up.
Although she was really impressed with whoever did, and kind of wished she could pick their brain about it. The whole royal palace just went kablooie just like that! Thankfully Lux and Jinx weren’t anywhere nearby at the time, they were off having an ‘outing’ (date) where they could get a little privacy away from prying Crownguards.
Sylas’s Mage Rebellion had finally struck its true opening blow against Demacia and the Kingdom descended swiftly into chaos soon after that. Lux had been struggling with torn loyalties for a while but when Tianna tried accusing Jinx of working with the Rebellion and pinning blame on her for the explosion, Lux suddenly didn’t have a lot of sympathy for her remaining family members and absconded with Jinx.
It also might have had something to do with the one real argument they ever had. At first Jinx simply hadn’t known much about the Mage Rebellion or how Demacia treated magic and those who could use it. She remembered Lux’s fear when they first met, but her magic was an open secret now and she was doing alright.
But, slowly, Jinx learned. And when she learned, she grew furious.
She compared Demacia to Piltover and the plight of the mages to that of Zaun, and when Lux weakly tried to defend her homeland and her family, Jinx spat at her that she was a coward and that Jinx wasn’t about to watch another slow genocide.
They didn’t speak for a week, and when they tentatively made up, they danced around the topic for a month before the attack.
Eventually, they met up with Sylas’s Rebellion but Jinx had no interest in being a foot-soldier. She’d seen enough violence for a lifetime and had long outgrown the desire to re-immerse herself in it. If there was a threat to herself or Lux, she would dispatch it with ruthless efficiency, with as much lethal force as required.
Otherwise?
Jinx had enough blood on her hands.
So instead, she and Lux began working with the Rebellion to funnel those who couldn’t or wouldn’t fight away from Demacia and their ‘labor camps’, getting them to places of safety.
It started as a small town. A village, in a remote swathe of land that lay between Demacian and Noxian borders. Long since abandoned, with only a few shacks and cabins having succumbed to rot ages ago.
But Lux, Jinx, and a handful of mages who didn’t want to fight on the front lines; mostly children and older, weaker mages, decided it would make as good a home as any and began building it up from nothing.
The Rebellion provided a few able bodies to assist in the beginning, and continued to funnel refugees to them. They also housed the sick and injured of the Rebellion, nursing them back to health before they returned to the fighting.
Lux was the pretty face who did a lot of the talking, but over the years it became obvious that the blue-haired woman with gleaming, purple eyes, who wore a sword but gave off the impression that she didn’t need to use it to kill you if she wanted to, who never left Lux’s side, was the de facto leader.
Eight months after the establishment of Sanctuary Village, they were found out by a group of Demacian scouts and a small contingent of soldiers.
Three days later, for the first time in years, Jinx had new blood on her hands.
She didn’t fight alone. Lux’s light cooked soldiers in their armor and left a marred wasteland of blackened grass in her wake, but when the fighting stopped and the people of Sanctuary looked on; it was Jinx, soaked in blood and filth, her own wounds gleaming and shimmering, that seemed to inspire them.
Jinx wasn’t used to being a hero for something she didn’t feel guilty about, for once.
But everywhere she went in Sanctuary after that, when people would see her, their colors would bleed blue. A new kind of blue, a kind of blue Jinx was unfamiliar with, but eventually she was able to piece it together.
This kind of blue was for loyalty.
Sanctuary grew.
Jinx, the unelected leader who didn’t ask for the job, protected her charges with the same lethal fury with which she protected her wife.
Six months after the Battle of Sanctuary, a new wave of refugees arrived. Among them was a young girl, no older than two years old, who was scared, alone, and had no one to lean on. Her parents had been killed by Mageseekers trying to hide her, and no one in the group of refugees had much cared to take her under their wing.
It took one look from Lux and about five seconds for Jinx to cave.
She didn’t have a name, or she didn’t remember what it was. Nobody knew exactly how old she was, either.
But she had violet eyes that made Jinx’s heart skip a beat and her stomach turn, and when she told Lux that the girls name would be Viola, Lux didn’t even blink. She simply smiled and said that sounded like a wonderful name.
Viola didn’t really care what she was called, she cared about the fact that Jinx and Lux fed her and clothed her and gave her a bed to sleep in and held her when she cried, and that was that.
~~~~~~~
The Mage Rebellion lasted another year and some change before a tentative truce agreement was made between Sylas and Prince Jarvan IV. The Mageseekers would be disbanded and the labor camps decommissioned, and those who used magic were no longer automatically criminals under Demacian law.
The reason the truce was made was due to Noxus.
With Demacia split between two threats; one within, one without, it was at risk of falling entirely. Sylas hated what Demacia stood for and how it treated mages, but he hated Noxus even more. So when Jarvan sent him an offer to talk peace in the light of Noxus’s impending invasion, he agreed.
But in truth, little of this mattered to the residents of Sanctuary Village (although it really wasn’t much of a village anymore with a little over a hundred residents), as long as they weren’t being attacked. The stories of Sanctuary had begun to spread, though, and the stories of the woman with glowing purple eyes who took down an entire squad of Demacian soldiers to protect them.
Jinx was incensed that Lux didn’t get any of the credit, but Lux just thought it was funny to see how riled up Jinx got for being the center of attention without people calling for her head.
Soon these rumors made their way to Piltover, and into the ears of Caitlyn Kiramman, who of course immediately passed the information on to her partner, Vi.
It was no small task trying to find a window of opportunity to leave Piltover. Even informing the Council of the suspicions regarding Jinx’s whereabouts were met with relief, not incensed anger and permission to seek her out and bring her to justice.
“The further away she is from Piltover, the less she can hurt it,” was the response Caitlyn was given over and over again.
~~~~~~~
Of course, one day Vi simply got fed up with waiting and left all on her own, with only a note and an apology for Caitlyn.
When she showed up in Sanctuary, Vi realized a bit too late that she probably shouldn’t have brought the fists.
She had to disengage and drop them quickly as several suspicious and defensive magic-users were pointing very dangerous looking hands filled with varying sorts of energy and elements at her, and she raised her hands in a surrender motion.
“I’m not here to hurt anyone,” Vi said loudly, trying to keep herself calm. “I just want to talk to Pow.”
‘Pow?’
‘Who’s that?’
‘We don’t have anyone with that name here, do we?’
The murmurs spread throughout the crowd and Vi was about to shout again when the crowd parted, and a blonde woman approached her. She had pale blue eyes and a regal sort of look to her, and Vi frowned when she realized she was looking at Luxanna Crownguard, the diplomat Demacia had sent to Piltover a few times several years ago.
“You must be Violet,” Luxanna said in a cool, clipped voice. “I suppose if I try and tell you she doesn’t want to speak to you, you aren’t going to listen to me?”
A thousand questions sprang to Vi’s lips, not the least of it was ‘How the hell did Jinx fall in with a Demacian ambassador?’ but instead she just set her jaw and shook her head.
“I just want to talk. No funny business or dragging her back to Piltover,” Vi said firmly. “I...I thought she was dead. No one has seen her in years. I mean, there’s been rumors, obviously, but this was the best lead I had for so long and I just – I have to know. Please.”
Luxanna stared at Vi with a hard look, taking a few steps closer. Even though Vi was taller than her by a head and a half, she grimaced slightly and shivered under her gaze. When she got close enough though, Vi froze.
In those pale blue eyes were little flecks of purple. Glowing purple.
Shimmer purple.
“Oh shit,” Vi whispered. “It really is her isn’t it? What’d she do to you?”
Luxanna looked confused for a moment before she put it together and scoffed lightly, rolling her eyes.
“I forgot you’d recognize it,” she said primly. “The answer to your first question is yes. The answer to your second question is none of your business.”
Vi opened her mouth to speak again but closed it after a moment. Luxanna was already clearly very ticked off by her presence and, well, Vi had heard things about the Crownguard daughter. Things that made her very much not want to piss her off further.
“Fine,” Luxanna sighed after a moment. “Come with me. But don’t expect her to be happy to see you.”
“I – uh – yeah,” Vi said dumbly before following quickly behind.
Luxanna led her to a decently sized, but not large, wooden cabin near the center of the town. She walked up the steps to the front door and paused, turning to Vi with an icy-cold look in her eyes.
“Mention the name Powder and we’ll see how you stand up to the full concentrated power of the sun, yeah?” Luxanna said in a saccharine tone that had Vi’s teeth hurting.
“But – I – “ Vi stammered for a second.
Luxanna took a step forward and jammed her finger into Vi’s collarbone.
“Her name is Jinx,” she hissed. “Jinx. Jinx. Get used to saying it. Get used to hearing it. Or you can find a new home in an urn. I’ve spent the better part of seven years helping her move on from her past and seeing you at all is already going to stir up a metric ton of shit that I’m going to have to deal with later. So do not make it worse than it’s already going to be. Do we understand each other?”
Vi just nodded. She didn’t really trust her tongue at the moment.
“Good,” Luxanna said with a faux smile, stepping back and opening the front door. “Now come on. Let’s get this over with,” she muttered.
“Oh boy,” Vi mumbled, hesitantly following her inside, suddenly very much second-guessing her decision to come here without Cait. Or, scratch that, her decision to come here at all.
When she crossed the threshold, Vi was immediately aware of a few things. One, that this was most definitely Jinx’s house, because there were tools and half-finished mechanical projects strewn everywhere. Two, it was somehow still much more organized than she was expecting. And three, she heard a familiar yet very foreign voice cooing over something.
“Oh wow kiddo that’s sweet! You wanna try that out later with Mummy in the back? I promise I won’t tell your Mom.”
“Yeah!” came a second, much younger sounding voice.
“What are we not telling me, exactly?” Luxanna said in that faux sweet voice as she stepped into the adjoining room. Vi took a few steps towards the doorway but hung back at Luxanna’s gesture.
“Uh oh looks like we got caught,” that familiar voice said again, grumbling. “If she asks I’m blaming you.”
“It was Mummy’s idea!” came the smaller voice.
“You little traitor!” the first voice yelped, followed by a cackling and squealing from the smaller voice. “Get back here you little – !”
Rounding the corner and making to hide behind Luxanna was a little girl. Vi guessed she was at least four years old, maybe five or six and just a little small, with mousey brown hair and a splash of freckles across a pale face. When she tucked herself behind Luxanna’s leg, Vi could see that her eyes were a deep violet color, and she sucked in a sharp breath.
The sound alerted the little girl to her presence, and she turned around and looked at her. Her eyes went wide and her jaw nearly hit the floor, and she immediately ran up to Vi’s feet.
“Wow! You’re tall! And your hair is pink!”
Vi didn’t really have functional vocal chords at the moment, so all she could do was stare back at the wide-eyed little girl.
“Viola that’s not how we introduce ourselves,” Luxanna scolded lightly, hurrying over and scooping the little girl up in her arms. “Try again.”
“Oops. Right. Sorry,” the little girl said, not sounding sorry in the slightest. She turned towards Vi and held her little hand out. “Hi! My name is Viola, what’s your name?”
Hesitantly, Vi reached her own hand out and grasped the tiny one, shaking it carefully. As she did so she saw a shadow approach the doorway, and she nearly lost her words again as a girl – woman, now – that she never thought she’d lay eyes on again walked into the door-frame and leaned on it with crossed arms.
She cut her hair, was the first thought that popped into Vi’s mind.
It was shorter now, not even down to her shoulders, but it was still that same shade of pale baby blue. Her eyes, narrowed and vaguely hostile, still that glowing, unsettling Shimmer purple. She was wearing a ratty brown shirt with oil stains all over it, and pants. With boots.
She didn’t say a word. She didn’t even seem that surprised to see Vi, which was unsettling. She simply leaned against the door-frame and stared with narrowed eyes, watching.
Waiting.
“I’m uh, my name’s Vi,” Vi said, clearing her throat a little.
“That’s cool! That’s kinda like my name!” Viola said happily, seemingly unperturbed by the delay between her greeting and Vi’s response.
“Well – yeah it is actually,” Vi said slowly. “It stands for Violet.”
“Like my eyes?” Viola asked. “Cool!”
“You’re named after her, squirt,” the woman – Vi still couldn’t really believe that was supposed to be her – drawled. A moment later the words sunk in and hit Vi like a freight train, and she nearly stumbled.
She – after me !?
“Really? Why?” Viola asked, tilting her head backwards to look at – look at her.
“Cus that’s your Aunt,” she said with a shrug. “My sister. Sorta.”
“Mummy has a sister!?” Viola whispered to Luxanna, sounding very scandalized in the way only a five-year-old who has had information kept from them can.
“Mmmhm,” Luxanna said, peering curiously at her, looking...pleasantly surprised.
“Whoa.”
Viola stared for a few more moments at Vi before squirming hard in Luxanna’s arms, and when she was put down she immediately ran over and grabbed Vi’s hand to begin dragging her through the house.
“You gotta come see me and Mummy’s bench! I made a really cool toy today!”
“I – uh – “ Vi stammered as Viola dragged her past her, who simply shifted aside and raised an eyebrow at Vi, as if to say ‘Are you gonna be the one to say no to her?’.
And Vi most certainly was not, so she let the little girl drag her into a room with two clear sides to it. One had a set of cabinets and worktables that were raised to an adult height, while the other side had a similar setup that was much lower to the ground.
Viola dragged her over to the lower one and grabbed a little wind-up toy, shoving it into Vi’s hands.
“Lookit!”
Vi examined the toy. It was a monkey, holding two cymbals.
Images flashed through her mind, screams and shouts echoed.
“ You’re a JINX!”
“That one won’t explode,” a bemused voice from behind her drawled.
Vi jumped and dropped the toy, and Viola caught it before it hit the ground.
“Kiddo go talk to your Mom for a bit, alright?” she said softly. Vi didn’t turn around.
“Okay! Can I play with Aunt Vi later though?”
“We’ll see, kiddo.”
The little girl scampered away and Vi fought to suppress the shaking in her shoulders. She stared at the monkey that Viola had placed on the workbench and flexed her fingers.
The woman behind her moved and raised her hand, and Vi felt fingers ‘walking’ on her shoulder as baby-blue hair came into her peripheral vision as she moved around her, grabbing a rolling stool and jumping onto it, sliding down to the other end of her workbench and grabbing something. Then she kicked off the bench and spun over to a stop in front of Vi, holding something in her hands.
“How much do you think the Little Man would shit himself if I showed him this little doohickey?” she asked, holding up what looked like an ornate picture frame. Vi just stared blankly at it, and after a moment she looked at it and frowned. “Oh, shit, wait. It’s not on. Hold on a second.”
She kicked away again and slid over to her workbench and started fiddling with it, muttering to herself. A few moments later she went a-ha! and slid back over, handing it back to Vi.
“I was borrowing the power source for something else. I put it back in now,” she explained, grabbing Vi’s hand and placing the picture frame into it.
It cycled through various images, fuzzing out and back in. Vi didn’t recognize most of them, but saw that she and the little girl, along with Luxanna, were the main subjects. At least one of the three was in every image. About ten images cycled through before it looped back to the first one.
“Light is fascinating,” she said quietly, taking the frame back. “If you bend it correctly it can show all kinds of colors. Figure out how to bend lots of little pieces of light all in slightly different ways and you can display an image on...it’s like a mirror? Sort of? And if you can make the thingy remember an orientation and a specified way to bend all the little bits of light, you can store an image. In light. How cool is that?”
She wheeled back over to the workbench and set the frame down, but this time she didn’t move again. She simply sat and waited.
Vi wasn’t sure how long she stood there in silence, but eventually she spoke up.
“A Crownguard?” she managed to choke out.
She kicked off again and this time stopped right in front of her, looking at her with a wry smile and a raised eyebrow.
“A Kiramman?” she drawled, just as incredulous.
Vi opened her mouth.
Closed it.
Opened it again.
Closed it again.
“...Fair point,” she mumbled out after a moment.
“Expensive taste must run in the family,” came the snickered reply.
“You – I – “ Vi stammered.
She sat patiently, hands folded in her lap. Waiting.
“What happened to you?” Vi whispered after a while. “I thought you were dead. I thought – I thought I lost you for good.”
A sigh was her only reply at first as she tilted her head back and looked at the ceiling, slowly spinning around in her stool.
“Listen, Vi,” came the soft words after a few minutes. “Powder is dead. Okay? Dead and buried. Gone. This conversation isn’t going to go anywhere unless I know you’ve got that in your head, alright?”
Vi blinked a few times.
“She – uh – Luxanna said to not say that name,” she mumbled.
“Starlight still has it in her head that I’m a lot more fragile than I am,” she hummed softly. “It’s okay. I don’t mind. It’s nice, actually, having someone care about you for once.”
“I cared about you,” Vi protested.
“You cared about Powder,” came the accusing, biting words, and when gleaming purple eyes snapped to meet Vi’s she could see her. Jinx. “You cared about Powder and where did that get her? Thrown right into the wide-open, waiting arms of Silco.”
“I – “ Vi hissed, her vision blurring as her eyes teared up. “I know. Okay!? I know that. But I tried to fix it and you wouldn’t let me.”
Jinx huffed lightly and pulled her knees up, almost squatting on the stool. Vi had no idea how she didn’t fall over sitting like that.
“Because you didn’t understand,” she said quietly after a moment, staring off into space. “You weren’t trying to make the situation actually better. You were just trying to get Powder back.”
“So what if I was!?” Vi sputtered.
“Powder is dead,” Jinx stressed. She stood up. “Dead. Dead as a fucking doornail, okay? She was dead the moment Silco got his fucking hands on her.”
Vi didn’t really know what to say to that. She just stared.
Jinx sighed.
“Back then, from where I was standing, you didn’t care about me,” she mumbled. “You still don’t. You cared, care, about a dead girl who once happened to have the same body as me. That’s all. If you had just accepted that and cared about the person I was at the time rather than who I was before that, maybe it would’ve been different.”
“But – but Pow is still a part of you. You can’t just – you can’t just undo your past and pretend it doesn’t exist,” Vi said, her voice halting and hesitant.
Jinx shook her head.
“Doesn’t work like that, Vi,” she said quietly. “I might as well have been born a fully-grown ten year old with a pre-broken brain. Eleven year old. Honestly I don’t even remember,” she huffed. “Next half-decade plus of what’s essentially a new persons life is then spent being ‘fathered’ by Silco. So. You can imagine what that would do to a person.”
Vi didn’t have to imagine.
She’d seen it.
“And then you come roaring back in screaming about a dead girl. A girl that I wouldn’t – couldn’t – be anymore. Lux understands that. She’s the first person to understand it, actually. That I can’t be Powder again. Being Powder again would be like – like acting as if Silco never happened to me. You saw what trying to suppress the guilt of Powder’s actions did to me. Imagine if I tried to suppress everything I did because of Silco just to go back.”
Suddenly, it clicked.
It made sense.
And Vi felt horrible.
“But – it wasn’t your fault. I know I yelled at you and I’ve spent well over a decade being so fucking sorry for it but – but it wasn’t your fault,” Vi said.
Jinx shook her head.
“No. Powder killed Vander, Mylo, and Claggor,” Jinx said softly. “It was a mistake. She was a dumb, panicked kid who didn’t know any better and was just trying to help. But it was her that pulled the trigger and took their lives. Their blood was on her hands. And she had to try and live with that, and couldn’t. I couldn’t.”
Vi felt lightheaded.
“And Jinx killed a lot of other people,” she continued softly. “Bad people. Good people. People who were a little bit of both. Some people who probably deserved it. Some who didn’t. Silco might have been pulling her strings and making her dance but Jinx’s hands are the ones soaked in blood. I have to live with that, too. Lux says I don’t deserve to die because of it, that killing me won’t bring the dead back to life and that if I really want to atone I should try saving lives instead of ending my own. But the blood is still there.”
Jinx held up her hands and looked at them, a faraway look in her Shimmer-purple eyes.
“The blood is still there, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t wash out that much red,” she murmured.
Then she reached out and rested her hand on Vi’s shoulder, moving to stand directly next to her and out of her line of sight.
“Leave, Vi. Leave and don’t come back, because Powder isn’t here. Only Jinx. And if you can’t accept Jinx, with all the weight and blood that comes with it, there’s nothing else for us to talk about. Nothing else for us to say. I will memorialize Violet in my daughter and Powder, wherever she is now, will love the sister she once had forever. But right now I don’t have a sister. Neither do you. So go. Grieve your sister. Mourn her. Memorialize Powder in your own way. Then, if you still want a sister, a new sister who’s got a bit of a fucked-up past but is trying to do better every single day, then you can come back. But not a moment before.”
Jinx sighed, long and heavy. She patted Vi’s shoulder and left, with one parting word.
“Goodbye, Violet.”
And then she was gone.
Vi heard a door open and shut in the distance, and a few minutes later she heard Luxanna’s voice from the doorway.
“You heard her,” she said quietly. “Leave.”
“I’m sorry,” Vi said, her voice hoarse.
“I don’t care,” Luxanna said simply. There was no malice, only plain, blunt apathy.
Vi took a deep breath and nodded. Then she turned around, and Luxanna escorted her out.
As she left Sanctuary on horseback – horseback, because there was no way to get a skiff or airship out this way – she thought.
As she boarded an airship back to Piltover, she thought some more.
And as she walked into the house she shared with Caitlyn, who immediately started in on a combination of telling Vi how much she missed her and scolding her for leaving her with ‘just a note what the HELL were you thinking!?’ she thought some more.
~~~~~~~
The Rest of It
~~~~~~~
Some years later, Sanctuary grew to the point of the other powers in the area taking notice. Namely, Demacia and Noxus. Once Sanctuary reached the point of really no longer being able to be called a village with over a thousand residents, and a little over half of them wielding magic in some shape or form, a governing body within the settlement was formed and declared itself a sovereign city-state independent from Demacia.
Despite much public expectation and hope, neither Luxanna Crownguard nor Jinx, the Mage’s Champion, would directly partake in the governing body of Sanctuary. They helped select the individuals who would make it up, but after that they and their daughter receded into a very private life, although Jinx and her daughter Viola both grew a rather urban-legend-esque reputation as a pair of inventors.
Demacia, after being assured that Sanctuary would not look to annex Demacian territory in its needs as a growing town and city, mostly left them alone. Still reeling from the Rebellion and with most of its military forces concentrated on Noxus they didn’t have much of a choice, but a non-aggression treaty was signed and Jarvan IV personally shook hands with a mage.
Noxus was far less open to diplomacy however. That is, until the force they sent to ‘negotiate’ in the Noxian way with Sanctuary was flattened by beams of light and a blue-haired, purple-eyed demon leading a more than capable force of mages to victory with minimal casualties. After that, Noxus mostly left Sanctuary alone. They, naturally, infiltrated it with spies, but that was par for the course with Noxus. Expected, almost.
For the next many years to come, while they would occasionally be seen in the city, Luxanna Crownguard and Jinx would become something of an urban legend to newcomers and those outside of Sanctuary. Jinx’s past in Zaun was occasionally brought up, but was usually dismissed as something that didn’t need to be bandied about.
Jinx was fine with this arrangement.
She preferred to stay inside anyway, surrounded by the golden love of her wife and her daughter, and watching as the blue idolization from her daughter slowly turned to the warm green tones of camaraderie as the two worked together in their workshop for sometimes hours on end.
~~~~~~~
Everything Jinx knew was something fluid and undefined. Ever-changing and ever-shifting; a mirror of the way her own mind functioned. She sees the world in color, the way people speak and breathe, the way they look at things and the emotions that come from them bleed in colors that Jinx had learned over time to identify.
Her home of Sanctuary was a canvas of swirling color, never keeping the same tones or brush strokes as streets popped up and more houses were built, more mages arrived; no longer refugees but simply people seeking a better life, a home where they knew they would be accepted and welcomed. Sometimes with their families in tow, their friends and loved ones who didn’t want them to go alone.
The people in Jinx’s life, they were fluid too.
One day Vander was there, a stocky quicksilver steel full of comforting stalwart colors like dark green satisfaction and orange-yellow happiness, and then he wasn’t.
One day Little Man was there, full of electric blue surprises and curiosity, the bruised gray irons of determination and stubbornness; and now Jinx knew of Ekko, the Boy who Shattered Time, and had made peace with him and his people. He never quite forgave her for leaving Zaun behind, but he quietly admitted once that even if he couldn’t forgive her, he understood, and it was probably for the better overall.
One day Silco was there, a myriad of colors but all of them muted and kept beneath a gray, blank exterior that Jinx now knows as the blanket of his own ambition, smothering his own humanity in the pursuit of Something More; a pursuit which, ultimately, led to his death. Now there are only memories, as Jinx slowly learned to synthesize the happy ones with the ones that had her waking in a cold sweat. She learned how to accept that there was always a part of her that would love him, for he was just as much her father as Vander ever was. She learned how to accept that her love was, ultimately, one sided and that Silco’s moments of care and warmth to her did not undo the pain and suffering he inflicted upon so many others.
Attitudes, the way people thought about Jinx, that changed a lot too.
To Sanctuary she was everything and nothing all at once; a hero and a savior to some, the Mage’s Champion who bled for them, soaked herself in blood for them, saved them. To others she was a demon, a warrior and a guardian yes; but someone to be feared, respected. In both forms the real person of Jinx was separated from that of a legend; a figurehead, as the woman behind the legend faded into privacy and obscurity.
To Piltover she was a terrorist, a criminal. No longer a real threat, but a ghost story, a cautionary tale and an urban legend, no longer spoken of by those in power while a distant echo of what once was is idolized by scant scatterings of rebellious youths who emulate her in childish ignorance of what truly made Jinx, creating pale imitations of her sigils and symbols.
To Zaun she was a traitor, who abandoned her home and her people out of a selfish desire for a better life. Unlike those who went to Piltover she wasn’t quite demonized or hated, and the stories of her sheer violence in the name of the oppressed and downtrodden told them that there was still some Zaun in her; but the bitterness remained that she could not have leveled that sort of violence in the name of Zaun.
To Demacia she was a footnote; her involvement with the Crownguard family buried out of embarrassment and desire to make the world forget Luxanna Crownguard and her consort ever existed. A foolish, useless endeavor perhaps, but in Demacia the Crownguards still held power and to speak Luxanna’s name was taboo; not enforceable by law, but not a topic bandied about in polite company.
All sorts of colors, all sorts of blends and twists and curls.
Everything changed, and anything could change. There was no use trying to predict it or stop it or stem the flow of it, Jinx could not shove her hands into the rent and open flesh of Fate and pinch its arteries closed to prevent the spurting blood from soaking her and changing everything, anything, on a whim; a roll of the die, a flip of the coin, a single misplaced word or idea or one careless action.
But Jinx learned, too, that change was not always blood and pain and death, bad luck and a jinx on all around her. Sometimes that roll of the die brought her a guiding light. Sometimes that flip of a coin brought her a violet-eyed daughter whose eye for creating something out of a pile of scrap was even sharper than Jinx’s. Sometimes, change was good, too.
Jinx stopped trying to stop the change a long time ago. But it wasn’t out of apathy anymore. Now it was out of acceptance, and peace. Peace with where Fate had led her, peace with where her life had been, peace with where her life was, and peace with wherever her life might go from here.
As she sat up in bed with her wife’s head resting on her shoulder, the two of them reading a letter from Viola telling them all about her first term as an apprentice in Piltover and how well she was doing, telling them that Aunt Vi and Aunt Cait said hello and that they were coming with her back to Sanctuary for a visit once term was over, Jinx smiled and kissed the top of Lux’s head.
“I love you,” Jinx hummed quietly.
Lux stilled.
Love was something Jinx took the longest to understand.
Acknowledge, sure. That came quickly. Jinx could acknowledge that Lux loved her just fine.
Acceptance came a little slower. That took some deprogramming, Lux having to convince her over and over again that she could be loved, that the world wasn’t going to end simply because somebody loved Jinx for Jinx.
Reciprocation, well...Jinx was always better with actions than she was with words. She certainly tried. She showed Lux in all the ways that mattered, to Jinx anyway, that she reciprocated. She thought. She still didn’t really understand, though. She didn’t know what love felt like. All she knew was that she belonged to Lux, even if Lux didn’t think she was a weapon and even when Jinx started feeling like she didn’t think she was a weapon anymore, it didn’t really matter. Lux was still her wielder, her guiding light, and love didn’t really factor into it.
Understanding, though, that only came with Viola.
With Viola, Jinx began to understand Love.
Love was all-encompassing. It was everything and nothing all at once. It was a mirror and it was a blank space and it was a cheering crowd, it was a field of flowers and a mushroom growing on a dead tree.
Jinx only understood Love once she realized that she didn’t need to understand, that Love simply Was.
And once she understood that, she knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that she Loved her guiding light. Her Lux.
Saying the words though, took a while.
Jinx was always better with actions, than with words.
Besides, words didn’t feel good enough for Jinx. Love was something amazing and spectacular and three dumb little words weren’t nearly big enough to hold everything she felt for Lux inside of them so she tried to package it all up in different ways.
Gifts, at first. Creations from Jinx’s workshop, which would very soon become Jinx and Viola’s workshop. Lux appreciated them, but the only ones she kept or revered were ones that Jinx could not understand. Viola’s very first creation, which didn’t even work. The little light-box that Jinx gave her on the day she mentioned that one of the townsfolk had referred to Lux as Jinx’s ‘wife’ and Jinx had to ask her what that meant.
Upon hearing the explanation, Jinx decided that the idea of a ceremony was stupid and that Lux was her wife no matter what some stuffy old man talking about gods said.
When the gifts didn’t seem to do the trick Jinx tried affection. She was never very good at affection and Lux was almost always the one who started it, but Jinx started to try more. It seemed to work, Lux certainly was very happy with it, but something still didn’t feel right.
Yet, reading that letter, hearing the little happy sounds that Lux would make as they read through it together, filled Jinx with such a deep contentment that she had a second epiphany about Love.
Yes, Love was amazing and spectacular and it was everything but it was also small and subtle and quiet, it was gentle like a spring breeze and delicate like a morning frost.
Jinx didn’t need to put Everything She Felt About Lux into those three words. They were simply one small part of a larger whole, a puzzle, a machine that was so much bigger than Jinx could ever fathom building. But build it she did, day by day, piece by piece.
Every time she said Lux’s name in that soft little way that still made Lux’s cheeks go a little pink, every time Lux caught her wrestling or working side by side in the workshop with their daughter, every time she would make a cutting remark at whatever idiot decided to undervalue Lux just because she was a woman, every time they fell asleep together and woke up together and lived together.
All of it, little pieces that bit by bit built the whole of Jinx’s Love.
The words? A formality. A little drop of oil in the machine, to keep it a little shinier, a little smoother. Not necessary, but certainly nice to have.
So she just said it. Like it was nothing. Like it was easy.
“I love you too,” Lux breathed softly, pressing herself a little firmer into Jinx’s side.
“I think...I think I’m the same. As you,” Jinx mused softly, setting the letter aside in favor of playing with Lux’s hair, watching the blonde locks curl and slip through her fingers over and over again. “Earlier, though.”
“Hmm?” Lux asked, the cyan-purple puzzlement misting off of her.
“You once told me you fell in love with me when I told you your light was beautiful,” Jinx murmured.
“I might recall that, yes,” Lux laughed softly.
“I think I fell in love with you the moment I saw your light,” Jinx said softly. “The moment I saw that precious little prism cupped in your hands as you lit your way through Piltover’s alleyways. The moment I decided to stop being a loose cannon, a dog off its leash, and just follow you around instead. The moment I chose you.”
“You just want to be the first one who fell in love between us,” Lux mumbled, but her cheeks were colored pink and Jinx knew what that meant now, she had asked. A blush meant Lux was either flustered or embarrassed.
“Please. We both know you’re the competitive one between us,” Jinx snorted.
“At least we aren’t like Cait and Vi,” Lux snickered.
“Oh don’t remind me,” Jinx groaned, dragging her hand down her face. “How did they manage to turn babysitting into a competition!?”
“Well I hope you’re ready to deal with it again, because Viola’s dragging them to visit,” Lux laughed.
“I named her well. Her and her Aunt are both designed to infuriate me,” Jinx said dramatically as she draped herself across Lux’s lap.
Lux smiled down at her, and Jinx smiled back.
“Love you,” Jinx said, marveling at how easy it was now.
“I love you too,” Lux replied, just as easily.
Because it was easy.
Everything could change, except one thing.
Jinx would never, ever stop falling in love with Lux.