Chapter Text
Powder wakes up and knows immediately that something is different. For one thing, she can literally smell it– the air is thick and clogged in a way that it’s never been before, and Powder is sitting up in her bunk, trying not to gag, when Vander throws open the door and shoves an air filtering mask at her stomach.
“Put it on,” he orders, serious and snappish in a way that Vander almost never is. “Right now.”
Powder claws at the mask, yanking the strap open and shoving it over her head. Once it’s fitted, she’s looking at the world through green-tinted glass, but she can breathe.
Vander isn’t wearing a mask, but he’s pulled his shirt up over his nose and mouth. “You good, kid?”
“What’s going on?” Powder asks.
Vander’s eyes are grim. “Don’t know.” He hands her another air mask. “Go to Mylo’s and give him this. I’ll get Claggor. Run.”
Powder grips the mask tightly. “What about you?”
“I’m fine,” Vander says. “I’ve breathed the Gray before.”
Powder’s heartbeat quickens. “This is the Gray?”
“Yes. Something must be wrong with the ducts.” Vander is already hurrying back up the stairs. “Let’s go, Powder.”
Powder kicks off her covers and scrambles after him. They’re both running up the stairs, but Vander is going a lot slower than Powder– he’s breathing too shallowly to be as unaffected as he claims, and when he stops suddenly at the top of the stairs, where the door opens into the alleyway, Powder thinks that the air has gotten to be too much for him– but then she shoves past him and sees the street.
Something is wrong with it.
Powder can’t quite put her finger on it. It looks too grim, too dirty, too creepy. It hasn’t looked like that since the first night she and Vi had spent with Vander after the bridge– the first night they’d spent with Vander, knowing that their parents wouldn’t be returning for them in the morning.
But Powder doesn’t have any more time to stare at the street. Vander is already shoving her away.
“Go,” he says. “Get to Mylo. Hurry.”
“But–”
“Now!”
He’s not going to let her argue, that much is obvious, so Powder spins on her heel and runs in the direction of Mylo’s apartment, leaving him to catch his breath in the doorway.
Powder runs down the street, gets to the corner, slams her hand against the brick, using it as an axis to make the sharp turn without slowing down– and immediately crashes into a warm, solid body, which lets out an all-too-familiar “Oof!”
Powder staggers backwards. “Sorry!”
And then the person comes into focus, and another head pops out from behind him, and Powder realizes that she’s just run straight into Claggor, with Mylo right behind him. Apparently, her brothers had actually remembered the lessons that Vander had drilled into the four– three– of them since they were kids. If there’s ever trouble you can’t handle, come immediately to The Last Drop. Color Powder surprised that they’d actually listened. But there’s no time to make fun of them, not when Mylo’s eyes are red and watering and Claggor is coughing a deep rattling cough that sounds like it’s coming from his bones.
“Here.” Powder shoves the mask in her hands into Mylo’s, then yanks off her own and tosses it at Claggor. “Put ‘em on.”
“No way!” Claggor says immediately, trying to give the mask back. “I’m not gonna–” he interrupts himself with a wheezing cough, but rallies admirably and goes on: “–take this from you, Powder, come on!”
“Yeah, you are, because she’s going to take this one!” Mylo says, also trying to give the mask back.
“I’m fine!” Powder says, but she can already feel her lungs beginning to constrict. She’s breathing shallowly now, the same as Vander. Copying him, she pulls her shirt up over her nose and mouth, which doesn’t really help, but she’s not about to let her brothers in on that. “Vander has another mask. I’ll be fine until we get back inside. Let’s go.”
Her brothers looked at each other, hesitant.
“Every second we waste out here is another second one of us doesn’t have a mask, and I’m not going to let you guys give one to me,” Powder points out, helpfully.
That seems to do it. They both roll their eyes, but then they adjust the straps and slip the masks on over their heads. The two of them stick close by her as they move back towards The Last Drop– Powder is pretty sure that they’re worried she might spontaneously drop dead at any moment. It was a good thing Ekko wasn’t here, he’d have never–
Ekko.
Powder’s heart stops. She stumbles on the cobblestones, and both of her brothers lunge to catch her at once.
“Powder!” Mylo says.
“Are you okay?” Claggor says.
“Ekko,” Powder manages. She looks blindly out at the dim streets, at the greenish haze rolling over the bright, closed shopfronts. It looks almost like the way Zaun used to be, in the years after the rebellion on the bridge. Powder half-expects Vi to come wandering out of one of the alleyways. “We have to find out if Ekko’s okay.”
“He’s Topside,” Claggor says. It seems that the discoloration of the air, the empty streets, the smell of the Gray, has brought him back to their childhood, as well– nobody calls Piltover Topside anymore. It’s just the uptown. “He said he was going to spend the night at the Academy. Maybe this hasn’t affected him.”
Powder swallows. Every fiber of her being wants to run over to the bridge, to run to the upper city, to find Ekko and make sure that he’s okay. But she can feel her own breathing getting dangerously shallow, and she knows that she has to get to The Last Drop first, before anything else.
The walk back seems a lot longer than the desperate run there. Even though Powder knows that it’s not far, every step feels like she’s pushing through the sludgy tides of the bay, before they’d cleaned it up.
The three of them stumble through the front door of The Last Drop an eternity later– it’s much less hazy inside, Powder realizes– and Vander rushes to greet them.
“Thank goodness,” he says, coming around the counter to give Claggor a hug, then hands Powder the extra mask, which she dutifully puts on. “I’d sent Powder after Mylo, but I was worried I wouldn’t get to you in time because…” he trails off, looking towards the guy slouched at the bar.
For a beautiful moment, Powder feels utter relief, because the person sitting there is undeniably Ekko, and he’s okay, and he’s sitting in the middle of The Last Drop.
But then her stomach drops, because it’s definitely Ekko, but it’s also… not Ekko.
Or, to be more accurate, it’s the Ekko that Powder had only seen very briefly, in a pulsing circle of light, right before he vanished. He has the hairstyle. He had the white paint on his face. He has the coat, covered in colorful messages in different people’s hands. For a second, Powder is absolutely certain that the Gray has gotten to her and she’s seeing things. But she blinks hard a few times, and he’s still there. Every detail of him is exactly as Powder remembers, and she has no idea why he’s here.
“Powder,” Ekko says, sounding relieved.
“Hey, hey, Little Man,” Claggor says. “What’s with the war paint?”
“You,” Powder breathes. “Who are you?”
She can hear her father’s and brothers’ heads all snapping around to stare incredulously at her, but Powder doesn’t care. She steps forwards, studying his face, and it’s a little more obvious that he’s really not her Ekko, now. His cheeks are a little sharper, his arms are still wiry, but it’s much more muscly wire, and his eyes are sadder and older-looking than her Ekko’s have ever looked.
This is confirmation. Powder hadn’t been imagining things when she’d seen that light and the person in the middle of it. She had really helped a different Ekko build a machine to get back to his home dimension.
And now, for some reason, he’s back. In his own body, now. And he had come right to The Last Drop, to look for her, which probably shouldn’t make her feel so warm inside. She has a boyfriend.
She does note that this other Ekko is not wearing a mask, breathing normally without any hint of distress. He’s very clearly used to the Gray in a way that Powder and the others are not. It occurs to her that Ekko’s return and the Gray showing up again for the first time in years might not be a coincidence.
“You’re him, aren’t you?” Powder asks. “The… other one?”
“Other one what?” Mylo says blankly from behind her. “Aren’t you Ekko?”
“Yeah,” Ekko says to him. “But I’m not… your Ekko. I’m from another universe. I don’t know how I got here– all I know is that I woke up, and I was here. And– before you freak out about that– that’s not all of it.”
“By all means, tell us the rest,” Vander says. He looks as unfazed as ever– Vander’s always been a steady guy– but it’s also possible that he thinks Ekko’s in the middle of a Gray-induced mental break. To be fair, Powder isn’t completely sure that that’s not what’s happening to her.
Ekko starts to pace. “Well– I don’t think that it’s just me that came here. I think that a bunch of people did, all from my dimension, and I think that we brought stuff with us, too. Things– and people– leaking into your dimension from ours, like… like someone blew a hole in it and we’re all falling out. Have you guys noticed anything weird around? Buildings that aren’t supposed to be where they are, or plants disappearing– anything like that? The Gray’s back– it’s not supposed to be here at all, but it comes and goes in my universe. Anything else?
“The Gray’s the big one,” Powder says, but she remembers how strange and wrong the street had looked, when she’d first stepped outside. “And I’ve got a question,” Powder adds, before the others– well, Mylo– can explode with What the hells and Are you crazys, and she loses her chance. “Where’s our Ekko? Did he get– displaced, somehow, by you?”
“I… don’t know,” Ekko says. “I’m sorry, Powder.”
“I’ve also got a question,” Vander says. “A whole alternate dimension? Here?”
“At least parts of Piltover and Zaun,” Ekko says. “Seems like that’s where everything’s happening these days. I came here because I knew that you could help me.” He meets Powder’s eyes, and her heartbeat quickens. A spike of adrenaline shoots through her heart.
“Because of last time,” she blurts out, and as she says it she knows it’s true. He came to her because she helped him last time. Back when he’d somehow possessed the body of her Ekko, and– and it’s like a dash of cold water over Powder’s soul.
Last time, Professor Heimerdinger had died.
“Last time?” she thinks she hears Mylo yelp. “What last time?”
But Powder can’t answer. She staggers backwards, heart pounding. She thinks of the person she’d seen in that web of light. The person that had looked exactly like this Ekko, right down to the coat. The person who she’d fallen in love with, just a little bit.
She can’t stop thinking about the way Professor Heimerdinger had dissolved into nothing.
If sending one person back to Ekko’s world had killed another… what would happen if they had to put an entire universe of people back where they belonged?
Without really thinking about it, Powder heads straight towards the door. Vander tries to catch her arm, but Powder shakes him off.
“I need to think,” she mutters, and presses her mask even tighter against her face, rushing out the door.
Her first thought is to go to her usual hideout– but no. Everybody in that bar knows that that exists. But there’s one place that’s mostly just hers. This other Ekko knows it, but Powder has a feeling that he won’t follow her.
And that’s how Powder finds herself in the little clearing in the middle of the sewage system, with a gorgeous mural on one wall dedicated to the one person who Powder could talk to for days. The one person that she could ask if she really wanted to go through this again.
Powder’s loved this place ever since the boy who hadn’t been Ekko had shown it to her. It wasn’t just the mural of her sister– it was the tree, stretching it over it all. Trees were still few and far between in Zaun, and none were so big. The air looks cleaner, too– Powder removes the mask, and realizes in surprise that she can breathe here. It’s close enough to Topside, maybe, or close enough to the tree– she’s probably not about to start hurling herself off of rooftops the way she’d done as a kid, but she can breathe okay if she’s just standing.
She sits down on a root, and puts her head in her hands.
She was glad that she had helped Ekko that time. It had been a worthy project, it had gotten her out of the routine of serving people in Vander’s bar, and it had really helped her to be passionate about a project again. She hadn’t realized just how much she had missed that feeling.
But Ekko had been hurt. He had been dizzy for days afterwards, and he hadn’t been able to remember a thing that had happened while the other Ekko had been in control of his body. And someone had died. Not someone that Powder was all that close to, but someone had died, and if they tried the exact same thing now, assuming a 1:1 ratio, didn’t that mean that millions upon millions of people would also die?
How could Powder be complicit in that?
Powder glances over at the mural, hoping that her sister’s sharp gaze would help her process all of this, somehow– and realizes, very abruptly, that there is a person in front of the mural, and they are staring at her.
The stranger is wearing a hooded blue jacket with two golden Ks back-to-back on the right shoulder, and a matching blue filtration mask that completely covers her face, also accented with gold. It reminds Powder of the old Enforcer masks, which didn’t just cover the nose and mouth, the way Powder’s own did, but anonymized the entire person.
Shit. Powder hadn’t really considered that this place, unlike her usual hideout, was technically accessible by anybody who wanted to drop in. Maybe this is actually this person’s own hideout, and she was about to get pissed at Powder for using it.
Powder steps forwards anyway, and the stranger just keeps looking at her.
“Sorry,” Powder says. “Didn’t mean to intrude.”
The stranger takes a moment to respond, and when she does, her voice is distorted, probably by the mask. “Jinx?”
Powder blinks. “Sorry?”
The stranger turns towards the wall. Her fists clench tightly in on themselves, then relax into a more loose position. “Sorry. You just… never mind.” She looks up at the painting, clearly studying it as Powder draws closer to stand beside her. “Maybe you would know. Why is she the only person on this?”
Powder frowns. “What do you mean?”
The stranger gives a little shrug. “In the other dimension, it’s a lot more people here than just one. That’s all.”
“Oh.” So this person is from the other Ekko’s world– the one with the Gray, the one with the dark streets, the one that seems so wrong. Powder wonders how she had figured out that she was in another universe in the first place, but decides not to ask. “Did you… know any of them? Or did you know her?”
The stranger beside her shifts. “No. Not really. Did… you?”
“She was my older sister.” Powder touches the painted cheek of an adult who never lived, hoping that the mention of the personal connection would scare the stranger off so that Powder could sit here in solitude. “She was my hero.”
The stranger stills. “She was?”
“Yeah.” Powder doesn’t mean to keep talking, to spill her guts to someone that she can’t even see the face of, but… universes had collided today, Powder didn’t know how to fix it, and right now, all she wanted was for her older sister to swoop in and somehow give her all the answers. Vi had always had all the answers. “She could do anything. I’ve never met anyone in the world who was just good in the way that she was.” Powder looks down at her hands– at the chipped red-pink polish on her nails, the same color as her sister’s hair. “Vi was tough as nails, but if somebody she loved needed her help, she didn’t know the meaning of the word no. Even if that meant hurting herself in the process. If one of us needed a lung transplant, Vi would have carved open her own chest to give hers to us, no questions asked. She would have done anything for us.”
The stranger’s breathing has gone strange, all shaky and shallow, like she’s forgotten to wear a filtration mask. “Us?”
“Yeah. Me, my brothers, our dad, my boyfriend. Maybe even Silco, if she ever met him.”
“Boy– Silco?” the stranger said, voice suddenly guarded– and with some unexpected rage threading through it. “That asshole? You still know him? Even here?”
“Woah.” Powder snaps. “I’m not judging your family, all right, man?”
The stranger scoffs. “Whatever.”
“Silco’s a good person,” Powder says. “What is your problem?”
The stranger waves a hand dismissively, like disparaging Powder’s family is nothing. “Maybe in your dimension. Anyway, I shouldn’t be surprised. Things are backwards here, anyway. The Vi that I knew doesn’t have a mural or anything like that, and she shouldn’t have one.”
Powder stiffens. The anger she’d felt at the Silco comment suddenly multiplies tenfold. “Excuse me?”
The stranger flinches, and it’s like all of the fight leaves her body. “Sorry. Sorry. That was out of line.” The stranger sits down on one of the roots of the tree, still looking up at the memorial. “You really love her, huh?”
Powder grips her mask tightly. “I always will.”
“Yeah. Same with me and my sister. Your sister– I’m sure that she loves you. I’m sure of it. Nothing can ever change that kind of love.” The stranger starts shredding one of the leaves on the ground. Her fingers are dirty and wrapped in bandages, and there is dried blood lining her knuckles. “Aren’t you mad at her, though?”
“Mad?”
“Sure. She abandoned you. She shouldn’t have–” the stranger stops suddenly. “Sorry. Again. This is none of my business.”
“Abandoned me?” Powder hisses. She steps up close to the stranger, glaring down at her. “She’s dead! Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“Nobody. Sorry.” The stranger stands back up. “See you around, Powder.” She starts back towards the tunnel that will take her back out onto the streets of Zaun.
And– that gait. The way she’d said Powder’s name. That voice.
“Wait,” Powder says.
The stranger pauses, but Powder can’t speak. A tentative hope is building in her chest, making her heart go into overdrive.
The stranger speaks, when Powder doesn’t. “I used to know you, too. That’s how I know your–”
Powder finds her voice, and she has to say it before she loses her nerve, so she interrupts the stranger in a moment of reckless hope, her heart crawling out of her chest to take hold of her tongue and say: “Vi?”
The stranger goes silent.
“Please.” Powder is suddenly ten years old again, cradling her older sister in her arms, screaming for Vi to come back, not to leave her, not to make her be all alone. Her voice comes from that little girl now, reaching through Powder to plead in the same way she pleaded when she was curled around an empty body on the floor in a Piltie apartment all those years ago. “Please, Vi. Please.”
The stranger reaches up, and there’s a hiss of air as she removes the filtration mask, hooking it onto her belt. Then, slowly, she flicks off her hood. Pink hair spills out, in an achingly familiar shade, and Powder gasps, or maybe she screams, and then she’s jolting forward, she’s losing control of her legs, she gets herself over to her sister somehow, and as Vi turns around, Powder throws herself into her older sister’s arms.
The last time Powder held her sister, Vi had been cooling rapidly, limp and unresponsive and gone. Now, Vi is holding her back, warm, strong arms wrapped tightly around her, head curled towards Powder’s, breath on Powder’s neck.
Breath. Breathing. Vi is alive. Vi is alive, she grew up, she’s had a whole life that she never got to have in Powder’s universe.
“I can’t believe it,” Powder says into Vi’s shoulder, and her voice comes out wobbly. She’s started crying, but she’s pretty sure that Vi is crying, too, if the wet sniffles next to her ear are any indication. “You’re alive. You’re alive. You’re alive.”
“You’re alive,” Vi replies, and hugs her tighter.
“Of course I am,” Powder says, but realizes as soon as she speaks that it would have been just as easy for her to die on the job as it had been for her Vi, and that might have been what had happened in Vi’s dimension, so she clutches her sister a little tighter. “I’m alive. You’re alive. We’re okay.”
“We’re okay,” Vi repeats. “We’re okay. God, Powder, I– I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay– it’s okay.” Powder can’t stop holding on to Vi. She can’t let go, not for anything. “I’m sorry. I can’t believe it. You’re alive.”
Vi pulls away, just enough to cup Powder’s face in her hands. Vi is crying– her cheeks are wet, and her eyes are still filled with tears. Powder searches her face, hungry for every detail. Vi has a facial tattoo– her own name, written in a thinner, smaller type than the tattoo on Vander’s wrist, but the same font, on her upper left cheek. Her freckles have faded, but they’re still there, just barely. Her face is thinner– it’s lost the baby fat. There’s a scar on her eyebrow, on her lip, on her cheek over the tattoo. She’s wearing makeup– just a little, just eyeshadow. Her ears are pierced. Her fingers are rough against Powder’s skin. There are edges of more tattoos on Vi’s neck. She looks grown-up in a way that Powder and her brothers don’t. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days. She looks too pale, too worn, too sad.
And she looks like Powder’s sister.
So she looks perfect.
Powder pulls her back into the hug, and Vi doesn’t resist.
“Your eyes,” Vi says into Powder’s hair. “They…” she trails off, choking up, and just holds Powder in the hug.
There are a lot of questions that Powder wants to ask. She wants to know what Vi’s dimension is like, she wants to know if Vi has any idea what’s going on or what triggered this, she wants to know if this is permanent.
But for now, all Powder can do is cling to her older sister, listening to her breathing, like the miracle that it is.