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It’s getting hard to breathe.
Topside’s too-clean air is thin, almost insubstantial compared to the heaviness of the undercity. The sea breeze is bracing, ripping across Ekko's skin and wound as he huddles in the shadows, biting his lips to keep the hisses of pain from alerting the few jumpy pilters skulking around the docks of the pristine, coin-shiny city of progress.
His head swims. There’s a faint buzzing in his ears that hasn’t gone away since Powd—since Jinx’s grenade went off in a cheerful explosion of neon pink. It makes planning difficult.
Fuck, he’s wasting time.
His ears are burning. A voice in the far back of his head, the voice that had always sounded like Benzo’s or Vi's, depending on how badly he fucks up, suggests that fever has set in.
Wasn’t very bright of ye to spend the night in a cold alleyway where the wind’ll eat at ye right after goin’ for a dip, eh, boy?
I had to, Benzo. Either that or take a grenade to the face.
Ekko bites his lip and drinks thirstily from the near-empty canteen he stole from an unawares merchant sailor. His leg hurts like hell. He thinks he’s seeing things.
Hazy spots swim in front of his vision as he leans heavily back against the wall. With every slower successive shuttering of his eyelids, every blink reveals ghosts. Old ones he thought he’d put to rest in paint upon the sun-bright memorial wall and new ones still walking, though haunted as badly as he. They flicker in and out of his consciousness: Benzo’s amiable grin between his impressive sideburns. Vi, scowling, thrusting up a bandaged middle finger. Vander’s solemn gaze, thoughtful, world-weary. Claggor’s crooked smile, Mylo’s overconfident sniff.
And spattered like graffiti through them all is Powder, Powder, Powder.
He can just see her now, behind the red-limned heat of his closed eyelids. Her blueness, her plain-faced luminosity. Her gap-toothed smile, her paintball gun. Not that maniac who had killed her. Powder, not Jinx.
He thought he had buried his grief over her long ago. That he could kill Jinx as easily as she killed his people. That he could do what even invincible, steely Vi couldn’t bring herself to do.
He almost did. On the bridge, where Jinx prowled, twitching and cackling and narrowing Powder’s big blue eyes at him as she taunted him. She was sickening. She sickened him. He was going to kill her.
But then, when he had reeled back his arm to stove her wretchedly gorgeous face in, pinning her to the cement, she had gasped, her voice going girlishly high, and for a moment all he could see was the face he had immortalized on the wall. The face of a girl who used to make his heart beat like a jackrabbit every time she’d giggled at his stories of duping a clueless customer, who had no qualms of wrestling with him and covering him in paint, who eagerly showed him her newest contraption and how it ticked—
Jinx—no, it was Powder now because Jinx had never made this face— Powder sucked in a breath. His heart seized. His fist, curled tight into itself, loosened. Her face, taut with pain and fear and mania, softened. She went pliant underneath him, warm and loose, and he could feel her exhausted sigh brush his face.
Just as he felt the old doubt begin to creep in (alongside an emotion that tasted of dangerous hope and something wilder and hotter), there was a familiar chitter of metal beside them, and when the grenade shattered, so did the old dreams he had the stupid softness to harbor any further.
His fever mounts. Ekko tilts his head back and rests it against the cobbled wall of the bridge, staring up at the star-studded sky of Piltover. They stand out so glaringly they make his eyes hurt.
Hey, he’s seeing things now. There’s a red-eyed figure slinking around the docks before him, watching him as he fights the mounting fire in his temples. He would fight back, bite the illness until it breaks and haul his battered and bruised frame, busted leg and all, back home, but he could only watch numbly as the figure flips elegantly and lands before him in a flourish of dust and gangly grace.
Ekko stares as the figure approaches. It’s not an enforcer—those goody-two-shoes don’t slink under bridges or fail to announce their presence with disembodied shouts. And this one, svelte and swaying bony hips as she walks up to him, is definitely not wearing their bulky azure uniforms. She’s wearing studded buckles and boots that scrape harshly against the stones, beating out a frenetic, amused tattoo.
Topside has shit air, but Ekko is suddenly short of breath for an entirely different reason as Powder leans in close and boops him on the nose.
“That’s it?” Her voice is sharp and mocking. It’s not Powder. It’s Jinx who tilts his head from side to side with rough fingers. “All it takes to do the boy savior in is a lousy fever?”
Ekko tries to speak, but his tongue is heavy in his mouth. All that comes out is a weak scoff. “Why’re you here?"
Jinx rocks back and forth on her heels, thoughtful. Her gaze is red and fitful. What happened to her blue eyes? Those were Powder’s. Ekko wants to scream. He wants to surge to his feet and finish what he had started on the bridge. But his body is sluggish and he feels like he just wants to sink through the pretty polished stones of Piltover’s streets and into the green arms of the undercity beneath.
Jinx’s strident words crackle and pop against his head. “I went to go get myself a cupcake, but these topsiders like locking up their sweets real tight. I’m taking a walk until they take a chill pill.
“As for you, you look like shit.” She unholsters something that clinks hollowly against her belt. Metal shines in her hand. Her gun. Her grin stretches wide across her face. “Do you want a nap? Want me to sing you a lullaby? You’d like that, huh?"
“Fuck,” Ekko rasps, “you.”
Jinx’s smile fades, and it’s quickly replaced by a snarl. A twitch of pain lances across her face, and she whips her head around, snapping at the empty river, “shut up!”
“You’re gonna kill me, Jinx?” He drawls out her name, digging the knife deeper. “I’m over here. Not dead in the river like you hoped.”
“I know you’re right there!” She whirls on him, pinning him against the bridge support with an inhuman and unexpected strength. He chokes, all the air shoved out of his lungs. Pain lances all the way up and down his leg, and he can’t hide the expression of agony that seizes his features.
Jinx’s face falters. Without releasing her grip on him, she lets her gaze travel down his body, raking over every inch of him before focusing on the dark red staining his knee, his calf. He stares at the hollow of her throat, where her leather studded belts emphasize the dip in her neck. Pain and hyper awareness shudders through him. He tries not to groan. Her eyes narrow, widen, close.
When she speaks again, her voice is dull.
“You’re so pathetic.” She lets him slide down against the wall. Her shoulders hunch inwards. “You’re no fun at all if you die like this, all alone topside. A fever? Really, Ekko?”
He has barely enough time to reel back from her first use of his name in years (if he’d known any better, he would’ve sworn she’d almost sounded sad) before she raises her arm and something explodes against his head. The last thing he hears before oblivion swallows him whole is Jinx, muttering to herself, her voice tumbling over itself with increasingly pitched fervor, like falling, like sobbing, like realization.
“…ad…”
His head pounds.
“L…ad! Lad! Are yo…uite alrigh…?”
Ekko gasps and jolts upright, lashing out with a right hook the way Vi taught him, but the puffy yellow Yordle yelps and dodges with a speed belying his soft features. “Oh, my! There, there, take it easy! I mean you no harm, my boy.”
Ekko blinks in confusion. His head is still pounding, but the dull throb of fever is gone. It only takes him a few moments before he startles with recognition. “Coun...Councilor Heimerdinger?”
The Yordle’s face twists. “Ah. It’s former, former Councilor Heimerdinger now. But, enough of introductions. Are you alright? You look like you need urgent medical attention.”
Ekko looks down at himself, remembering every ache and pain, before he startles and scrabbles upright. He’s been propped up against a stack of crates, hover board tucked underneath his arm, but his leg—his leg—
Heimerdinger looks over his calf with a blustery mix of concern and relief. “Well now! I’m no physician, but it seems that this tourniquet has saved your life. Well done. You’re quite resourceful, lad.”
Ekko puts a trembling hand on his calf. His leg throbs with pain, his head with exhaustion, and his chest with something akin to great, overwhelming grief. He has to bite his lip, violently blinking his stinging eyes, before breathing out and reorienting himself.
“Yeah,” he mumbles, running his thumb over the leather studded buckle, speckled with blue paint and dark blood, over and over again. “Yeah, I guess I am.”
.
.
.
fin