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Jinx’s eyes were open.
She knew this because she could only see the ghosts when her eyes were closed, and she couldn’t see the ghosts right now.
Ipso facto, her eyes were open.
But fuck was it dark in here.
She took a tentative step forward, and when nothing happened, another. Jinx knew she was supposed to be doing something really important, but her brain had all the potential energy of wet gunpowder. She couldn’t seem to hold onto her thoughts.
Was she dead?
No, that didn’t seem right. Her muscles obeyed when she asked them to contract and relax, though it did feel like she was moving through sump water. She poked herself, and she felt the pressure on both her finger and her stomach. Jinx didn’t think she’d be able to do that if she were really dead.
She ran a hand through her hair. Nothing made any sense! She wasn’t dead, but the ghosts were quiet. She could move, but couldn’t think.
And it was so. Damn. Dark.
“Jinx… Jinx…”
Her ears perked up. That was definitely her name she just heard. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere over her left shoulder. Jinx turned, her hand moved to Zapper’s holster only to find it empty. A quick pat-down revealed her bandoliers of grenades and ammo were gone too, as were Fishbones and Pow-Pow.
Jinx’s eyes widened.
Where did her guns go?
She needed her guns. It was really, really, really important that she had her guns but she didn’t know why!
“Breathe.” Jinx whispered to herself. Her voice was rougher than usual, like she’d been yelling, or inhaling smoke, or both. She took a long, rattling breath that sounded like a punctured lung deflating. Not her lung, obviously, but someone else’s.
Or maybe it was hers, judging by the sharp pain in her side. Actually, she was in quite a lot of pain, now that she thought about it. Her ribs hurt, her left arm was screaming at her from a point just below her elbow, and her throat felt… wet?
Jinx raised a hand to her neck, and it came back a sick purplish red, glittering with shimmer and blood.
“Oh, that’s not good.” She choked.
“Jinx… Jinx please… Come back…”
Jinx furrowed her brow. She couldn’t place the voice, but the fear in it made her stomach twist. She needed to do something, anything to help the owner of the voice. It was vitally important, even if she couldn’t remember why. She began walking in the general direction of the voice as its cries got more frequent and more panicked.
“Hey, I’m goin’ as fast as I can, gimme a break.” Jinx muttered.
Her eyes widened.
Shit.
No, no that can’t be right, she would never leave her behind, not when they were fighting—
“Nocturne.” She whispered.
The darkness began to writhe and twitch around her, coalescing into incomprehensible shapes that were probably supposed to be terrifying.
But Jinx had been staring into the abyss for a long, long time.
Long enough to know it blinks.
A familiar weight settled on her shoulders. She detached her last chomper, pulled the pin, and pulled her arm back.
“Sure hope this doesn’t backfire spectacularly. Then again, it would be pretty cool.” She said to herself, and then she pitched the chomper into the abyss.
A small pinprick of light appeared in the middle of her vision, from it bloomed a panoply of beautiful, multicolored flames. Blue, purple, pink, red, and most importantly to Jinx, gold.
Gold like her.
The shock wave sent her braids twisting behind her back like twin snakes, and she shifted her weight to keep from falling over. The surrounding blackness howled, and began to tear itself apart at the seams. Slowly, between tatters of unnatural dark, the world came back to her.
It didn’t look great.
She was standing in the middle of a packed dirt road in some backwater Demaican border town. Thatched roofs and shoddy huts of wood and mud burned all around her. A forest of corpses lay in the road, their empty eye sockets weeping a liquid the color and consistency of pitch. To her left, Shyvana pulled herself from the wreckage of a schoolhouse to her left, bloody, but alive. The prince, Jarvan, was at her side in an instant, his helmet gone and his golden armor tarnished to a ruddy bronze. Garen collapsed next to her with a muffled clank and breathed a ragged sigh of relief. Jinx raised her hands and puzzled at the long, curved blade strapped to her wrists. One was covered in her own iridescent purple blood, the other in a more conventional red.
“Jinx?”
Her name was never supposed to sound that beautiful, like the gods themselves sang it. But why would they ever do that? The best she usually got was screams of terror.
She turned, and let out a wet gasp.
Gold and rainbows and eyes the color of the endless blue sky crashed into her like waves, nearly knocking her from her feet. She was the most beautiful person Jinx had ever laid eyes on. She was tall, almost a foot taller than Jinx, with patrician cheekbones that curved into a sharp but delicate jawline and golden tresses of hair, regrettably marred by dirt and dried blood, that fell just past her shoulders.
Full, red lips parted into a relieved smile that burned with such radiance it made Jinx blink against it, and the angel stepped towards her, arms outstretched.
It was good that she did, Jinx had lost a lot of blood, even for her, and it was starting to finally take its toll. She collapsed into the arms of the angel that knew her name, and it felt like falling into the softest bed in the universe.
She didn’t realize from a distance, but the angel was crying.
Tears, clear as a mountain spring, slid down her perfect nose and landed delicately on Jinx’s cheek as she held her.
“We got you out, you’re gonna be okay, you just have to stay with me.” She whimpered.
It seemed such an injustice to Jinx’s clouded mind that something so beautiful would be so sad. Besides, she wasn’t going anywhere. It would take a lot more to kill her than a slit throat and a few broken ribs, although there was no way to tell the angel that. When she tried, all she managed to do was dribble blood and shimmer down her cheek.
“Don’t speak right now love, a healer is coming.”
Somewhere in the back of her mind a gear clicked into place and began to spin. She harangued her torn throat to do her bidding again and managed to force out a handful of words.
“I… Know… You…”
The angel nodded frantically. It filled Jinx with a beautiful warmth. Clearly she did something right.
“Lux…” Jinx whispered.
Lux. Her Lux. Her sunshine. Gods, how could she ever forget? How did the dark make her forget about her sunshine? How long was she trapped in that all-consuming blackness? What had Nocturne done with her in the meantime?
“Yes it’s me, it’s your Lux.”
Her shoulders shook with tiny sobs. Jinx reached up with a shaking hand and wiped a tear away with her thumb, marvelling at the perfect smoothness of her skin.
“Don’t cry… You’re…. Perfect”
Lux let out a noise somewhere between a sob and a scream as her threadbare composure finally snapped. She pulled Jinx tight to her chest as waves and waves of tears shook her. Jinx desperately wanted to hold her, tell her everything was okay and that nothing bad would happen to her ever again, but her arms were full of buckshot and her throat wept fresh blood from barely healed tissue.
Unconsciousness snuck up on her like a gas leak.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Jinx’s eyes snapped open fast enough she almost heard them. She blinked owlishly, trying to get a handle on her surroundings.
Crisp winter sun streamed in through a set narrow windows set into thick, ancient stonework. The hearth opposite the bed was down to a pile of grey embers, and there was a small, warm something tucked up underneath her arm that twitched as she began to move.
She sighed and carefully rolled over just in time to see Aisha’s eyes open halfway. They were the same color as Jinx’s were when she was her daughter’s age. Not chemical purple, but deep blue.
Aisha blinked and smiled at her. Jinx’s heart melted, as it did every time she smiled.
“What are you doin’ in here bug? And where’s your mother?” Jinx asked.
“I…” Aisha paused to yawn. “I was supposed to tell you that breakfast is ready, but I fell asleep again.”
“And how long ago was that?” Jinx ruffled her periwinkle curls.
Both her and Aisha’s stomachs grumbled, and Aisha devolved into a fit of giggles. Jinx laughed along with her.
How did a sumprat like her get so lucky? Jinx felt warm and full in a way that she wouldn’t have thought possible in her youth. To feel this content in Zaun was a death sentence, and even after her arrival in Demacia, the events of the rebellion and her time under the influence of Nocturne were anything but restful. But now Nocturne was dead, and while the rebellion had settled into a lengthy cold war, Terbisia was a safe haven, and a shining example of what peaceful coexistence could look like.
It was in the past, despite what her dreams tried to tell her.
“Let’s go find mom, yeah?” Jinx said.
Aisha sprung up, all traces of sleep evaporating, and took off running down the hall. Jinx stretched her arms over her head to a chorus of muted pops. She was a canvas of old wounds, about fifty percent scar tissue by volume. Some of them were catching up to her, even through her shimmer’s accelerated healing. Her right elbow hurt when it rained, and sleeping wrong meant her neck wouldn’t move for most of the next day. Since Nocturne slit her throat, she had trouble speaking too loudly, and the timbre of her voice got even raspier than before. Most annoying was her left leg, which had crossed some sort of threshold and decided it no longer wanted to function for the first couple of hours after waking.
But she was alive. By some miracle, Jinx was still breathing. She was breathing and she was safe and she was loved. She shed a tear for it almost every morning. People like her usually didn’t get to live. After all, who was she?
A terrorist? A revolutionary? A danger to everyone around her? Maybe at one point. The first few decades of her life were defined by misery and violence. It was all she knew, and often she reveled in it.
Now she was building Terbisia’s sewer system and teaching Aisha how to make little metal bugs out of scrap. She and Jinx shared the same aptitude for machinery, and when her first one flew under its own power, it took everything in her not to burst into tears.
She doubted anyone back home would even recognize her now. The thought made her giggle.
Jinx took a deep breath and grabbed her cane from its spot next to her bedside. She tested her weight on her bad leg and found it was in better spirits than usual, though not so good that she could leave the cane in the bedroom. Besides, it had a multitude of other uses besides being just a mobility aid. She rose to her feet with a grunt, dressed herself in a pair of soft wool trousers and a flowing white shirt cinched at the waist with a wide leather belt. On the way out the door, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Loose strands of greying hair were starting to grow more prominent among all the blue, and the lines in her face were all but permanent.
She didn’t care. Aging was an honor not meant for people like her, and until such time as the world realized its mistake, Jinx planned on appreciating every moment of it.
The hallways of the governor’s estate clung to the autumn chill longer than their bedroom, and Jinx winced as her bare feet brushed the stone. She ambled down the corridor, taking care to keep to the maroon carpet that ran the length of the space. Aisha’s head emerged from the door at the end of the hall, and she beckoned Jinx forward excitedly. Her tiny hands glowed softly from within, rainbows mingling with the yellow-white morning.
“C’mon sleepyhead, it's getting cold!” Aisha crowed down the hall. Jinx smiled and raised a hand.
“I’ll get there when I get there, don’t worry. You left the lights on though.”
Aisha was getting better at controlling her inherited gift, but the excitement of childhood still often got the better of her. She stared down at her hands and scrunched her face up in the way both her and Lux did when they concentrated. After a moment, the light faded.
“Good job, kiddo.” Jinx said.
Aisha beamed. Next to her, a small shadow in a half-melted miner’s cap waved at Jinx before following her daughter around the corner towards the dining room.
“Thanks for keeping an eye on her.” Jinx whispered, and she continued her trek towards breakfast.
The estate had a formal dining room, but the governess and her family rarely used it unless they were entertaining someone worth impressing. More often, they chose to dine in a small adjacent room that was furnished for a more intimate eating experience. A round table, large enough for half a dozen people, sat in the middle of the room surrounded by a set of wooden chairs Jinx made as one of her first forays into woodworking. A large bay window bathed the room in gold in the mornings and provided a beautiful view of the main settlement. Although at this point, calling it a settlement felt like an understatement. It was a thriving frontier town that was growing larger by the day.
By the time she made it to the dining room, the kitchen staff had just finished laying out the bounty. Scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, fruit parfaits, and Jinx’s favorite.
Pancakes.
Aisha sat patiently in her chair, waiting for Jinx to arrive. She was doing an admirable job not diving into the food already portioned to her plate.
Lux was nowhere to be found.
Jinx frowned. “Where’d your mother get off to?”
“She had some business to take care of while her wife slept in.” Said a voice behind her. Jinx turned to watch the angel approach her, just like she did that day in her dream. Long, muscular arms wrapped around Jinx’s shoulders, and Lux buried her face in the crook of her neck. Jinx sighed and leaned into her wife’s soft, unyielding embrace.
“I had the dream again.” Jinx murmured.
Lux squeezed her a little tighter. “You always do around the anniversary.”
She glanced over at Aisha, who was gazing out the window. The sun spilled across their daughter’s face as she closed her eyes and smiled at the waking world.
Lux put a hand on Jinx’s cheek and pulled her into a soft kiss. She tasted like noon on a summer’s day, when the breeze was just right and the sky was clear for miles.
“Are you okay?” Lux asked as they separated.
Jinx smiled at her, and looked out the window. The ghosts of Mylo, Claggor, Warwick, and Isha stood in the corner of the dining room, peacefully observing the beautiful life she worked so hard to create.
“Yeah,” She whispered, just loud enough for Lux to hear.
“I am now.”