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Jinx’s memories of light have always been somewhat twisted. The day they stole the crystals from Jayce’s lab, the blood red battles on the bridge, the electric explosion that took Milo and Claggor from them, even the bio-luminescent spores in the mines hold the memory of danger in the back of her mind.
The space that Mr Fortune Cookie has built is not that. It is a haven without suffering., with enough food to go around, clean air and the quiet, complicit understanding that death, even when it comes wearing her own face is not welcome within its metal walls.
Jinx puts down her telescope and sighs. Isha is having fun it seems, riding on the back of the newly christened Warwick as Jayce looks on, his warped hammer almost forgotten as he chases the pair back and forth, nominally doing so for exercise, but practically doing so because he’s obviously having minor heart attacks any time Isha’s hands slip on the harness Jinx herself had built to protect her father’s new form.
Thump, thump. Her momentary lapse of focus is further interrupted by the reverberations that sway her hideout from the unfortunately bold interloper that has taken to bothering her while she’s on duty.
“Too busy for a snack?” Caitlyn’s clipped vowels have her scrunching her mouth in instinctual defiance, but she’d made a promise to her sister to at least try with the Piltie that had saved their dad.
“Oh yeah, I’m swamped,” she bemoans, while reluctantly shuffling to make space for the big botherer that was already making her way up the ladder. “And anyway, I’m allergic to Cupcakes.”
By the time Caitlyn’s face is in view, her mouth is set in the wide facsimile of joy she knows pisses Kiramman off, but the woman just smiles and pulls herself up to sit beside Jinx, handing her one of the new blue fruits Viktor has been cultivating in his personal garden.
She takes a bite and lets the tart juices burst over her tongue, smacking her lips together just to see Caitlyn suppress a flinch at the sound.
“He named this one yet?”
Caitlyn chuckles. “No, thank goodness.”
There has been many a silent debate in the commune over Viktor’s tendency towards the simplest of naming conventions, a habit Jayce suggests is left over from their days in the academy labs, when documentation and efficiency were of the highest import. Jinx figures it’s just something wrong in the guys noggin’ but even those healed by the man seem to avoid using the dryly descriptive names he gives his biological creations, in favour of the nicknames Jinx and Vi pass around like candy.
“What would you suggest for this one then?” Caitlyn’s voice is soft, someone more optimistic might even say curious, as if she genuinely wants to know Jinx’s opinion or something.
“Why? You too afraid to try it?”
“The fruit?” Caitlyn is frowning now, “Or-“
“Jeeze, it was just a joke.” Jinx’s heart is pattering in her chest, and she curls in on herself, overly aware that’s she’s managed to fuck up again and ruin the tenuous peace the two of them had brokered by being an impulsive bitch again.
“No, Jinx, I didn’t mean to- Shit!” Caitlyn sways back and forth as she speaks curling up in almost the same position as Jinx herself.
It’s comforting actually, in a way Jinx doesn’t have the words to put her finger on yet. She knows all Caitlyn Kiramman used to see in her was fire and death, the officer in her always far more attuned to the powderkeg inside Jinx’s heart that left a trail of bodies in her wake, including Caitlyn’s own mother, than Vi on account of her not having the rose-tinted goggles that sisterhood had granted them both. If she was being honest with herself Jinx had never really expected to be forgiven for that, it wasn’t even something she’d asked for, and yet here they were, sitting side by side with the urge to shoot to kill tucked quietly behind their teeth, for the most part at least.
The moment stretches out like a sigh across the river that used to divide them, two people so unfathomably different, held together only by love for the woman who used her fists to speak the words that her heart could not.
Jinx is no expert in these things, but she supposes alliances have been forged on worse foundations.
“They were too sour for me actually.” Caitlyn admits finally, like it’s a weakness greater than forgiving your mortal enemy. “Your sister laughed so hard when I spat the first mouthful out I thought she might have pulled a rib or something.”
Jinx snorts at the image.
“Yeah, well, we can let her have the honour of naming this batch then, I’m sure Vik’s already working on cultivating something the younger ones can stomach.”
Caitlyn smiles and nods, letting her know she was dead on the money, as she often is, without anymore friction.
They don’t speak for a long while after that, the only words that needed to have been said already exhausted. After a while the rancorous pocket of activity from her ramshackle family dies down, and if Jinx squints she can see Jayce leading Warwick back to his cell turned quarters. Sunset falls on the settlement, washing the world in a pink haze, softening the edges of even Jinx’s bitter nerves and she unwinds herself, turning to see Caitlyn in a similar state, awestruck by the serenity neither of them truly thought was possible until they put down their weapons and took up their own private battles, to heal the aching, but no longer rancid thing that stretches between them, soaking into the air as only grief can.
“Sleepover?” Jinx suggests, suddenly desperate to make the moment last.
For the first time in their acquaintance, Caitlyn’s face breaks into a toothy grin at her words and she lets out a laugh that echoes against the cliffs around them.
“God, I thought you’d never ask.” She admits, impossibly leaning in, as if they were two old friends sharing secrets. “Did you know that even at her grand age your sister refuses to admit that she snores?”
“Old news,” she shrugs, doing her best not to smother the smoldering feeling of safety in her gut. “Did you know that when we were kids…”
Jinx lets her mouth run away with her for good this time, spilling the kind of secrets Vi would start throwing things for giving up unprompted. She’s sure this isn’t the end the friction that exists between her and Caitlyn, but for all that her memories of light are twisted, staring into the eyes of the woman she once would skewered for sequestering Vi’s time and affection away from her, there is the ghost of a smiling, maternal face, that glows with the same disgruntled kindness that echoes through everything Caitlyn Kiramman tries to bring to the pocket of paradise Jinx is learning to call a home, and that panicked bird in her breast tilts its head in understanding, as she realises that in the acting of trying, as clumsy as her attempts might have and continue to be, instead of losing a sister, she starting to accept that she might just be gaining a friend.