Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She thinks she hears Vi scream her name as she falls.

Jinx. Jinx. Always a Jinx. A name bestowed upon her outside a burning cannery lifetimes ago. The death of Powder; Jinx’s bloody baptism. Dripping with bilgewater, nails blood-crusted. Bawling: “Vi, come back! Please, come back!”

Because you’re a Jinx!

Jinx. A name, a promise, a prophecy that she has fulfilled again and again and again. 

She turns to Vander and takes his face gently between her hands. His lips are pulled back from his teeth, his mouth a snarl, his eyes two pitiless holes into the empty husk that once contained him. Jinx waits for the fear, but it doesn’t come. She feels only a warm stab of affection pitted somewhere beneath her ribs—a softness she’s never been able to shake. Vander’s face, in all its forms, is beloved to her.

She pulls the grenade from her belt.

Sorry, Dad. I have to blow us up one final time.

Vander still hasn’t made a fatal swipe at her, and Jinx tells herself that some part of the beast’s body remembers protecting her, even if the mind is long gone. Same way that Jinx had put all those holes in Silco when he’d lifted his pistol and aimed it at Vi.

She remembers the emotions of that moment with crystalline clarity, although the memory itself, like so many of her memories, has receded into dreamlike nebulousness. She recalls Silco’s hand finding the pistol, hers the minigun. Until that moment, she’d been so sure that all her love for Vi had worn itself out, gone rusty from disuse. But that old instinct had reared its head—keep Vi safe, keep Vi safe—and…well…

She still hasn’t escaped that instinct.

She should have learned better by now. Her protection is always more likely to backfire than not. If there’s a way to jinx it up, she will.

She remembers little hands toying with the ends of her braids, eyes like a Topside sunset, all gold and amber. Isha. Isha. Three blue gems slotted into a gun, into a monkey, into the hollow chamber that once housed Jinx’s heart.

This will be Vander’s third explosion. You’d think there’d be a limit on how many times you can blow the same man up.

Jinx’s fingers find the pin. She is crying, and she knows Vi is crying too, far, far above. But she’ll be all right. Her big sis. Fat hands. Vi has things to live for, a Piltie girlfriend, a population that doesn’t despise her for terrorising the shit out of them, and an Undercity that will always respect Vander’s eldest daughter, the true successor to his legacy.

That could have been Jinx once, but she’d inherited Silco’s legacy instead. His silver-wit and shimmer shots. His bullets and bombs. He’s waiting for her probably, in Hell, or oblivion, or whatever the fuck comes next.

I’m on my way, Daddy-o.

She continues to plummet, hands on the grenade, Vander’s clawed grip bracingly tight around her torso. Something blue is shining from below—the remains of whatever was beneath the Hexgates? Doesn’t matter, she supposes. Dead is dead. It might even be sort of poetic to fall into that endless blue, the same colour as the stones that stole her family.

She’s glad Ekko talked her into sticking around to fight. All in all, this doesn’t seem a terrible way to go.

She pulls the pin.

Chapter Text

The wind tears at Ekko as he speeds through the sky, his feet steady atop his hoverboard. The Z-drive he holds close to his side, a final lifeline, a buoy in the storm.

He’s still wearing the attire Jinx talked him into. The crop top isn’t exactly what he’d call life-or-death fight appropriate, but isn’t that just Jinx personified? Other marks of her are all over him, her colours and contours, splatters of paint on his skin.

It bolsters his courage as he sails toward Jayce and the machine man that used to be Viktor.

He fucks it up the first time. One of those things sweeps his feet fully out from beneath him with a preternaturally swift movement, arm outflung.

Ekko tears at the cord attached to his Z-drive and tries again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

It’s like being stood before Jinx all over again, her eyes digging into him—that miasmic pink glow—the press of alternate-her’s kiss still warm against his lips. Knowing that if he doesn’t get it right and get it right soon, he’ll get blown the fuck up.

He finds himself stuck, one of those machine-thing’s hands locked around his jaw as he pulls and pulls and pulls at the Z-drive. But four seconds isn’t enough. It keeps taking him back to the same captive position. An inescapable loop of defeat.

His mind turns frantic. It can’t possibly end like this. He can’t have given up that other world—Benzo, Vander, Mylo, Claggor, Powder, Powder, Powder—just to fuck it all up anyway.

He scrabbles at the Z-drive. Finds the dial. The one he definitely shouldn’t touch. The one that’ll take him out of the relative safety of four seconds and into exploding Yordle territory. Might as well, he figures. The world’s gonna end either way.

He turns the dial and yanks the cord.

Time rewinds as the Hextech reckons with this new input. Ekko finds himself carried back, back, until he’s hurtling toward Viktor once more.

There’s no real logic in what he does next. Only an animal fear and blind faith—the sort of thing most Trencher's can't afford, but that Ekko's always excelled at. He's always been a sucker for a lost cause. The Z-drive is buzzing in his hand, hot to the touch, vibrating with the onslaught of the sudden demand.

Ekko takes it in hand and throws it directly at Viktor’s face.

The world explodes.

In all timelines, in all possibilities, only you can show me this.

Viktor trembles at the memory of his alternate self. He sees himself in Jayce’s mind, sees the lines that age has carved into his face and the old pain in his eyes.

There is no prize for perfection.

Endless hours of donning the mask of a machine, of drilling himself into near-emotionlessness, just to be stood in front of Jayce once more, cracking right down the middle.

“We finish this,” Jayce says. “Together.”

And Viktor just looks at him. Clear-eyed Jayce. Lovely Jayce. So endlessly hopeful. So hopelessly naive.

He had forgotten, in his transition from man to machine, the precise hue of Jayce’s eyes. He had forgotten what it felt like to have hands around him, the stabilising certainty of Jayce’s embrace. Warmth down to his core, that was Jayce Talis: warm smile, warm eyes, warm hands. Viktor was his counterpoint. A cold machine of a man, even before his transformation.

He could not fathom why Jayce had persisted in this, promise or no.

All I want, he had said, is my partner back.

Viktor loves him. He knows that now.

He feels it thrumming somewhere beneath his breastbone, in his mechanical heart, a pumping colossus of cogs and wheels that he wishes to press into Jayce’s hand and let him rewire at his leisure. Maybe he can make it work right, make him work right.

Viktor holds onto Jayce for dear life as he takes the Hextech from his wrist and places it between their clasped hands. Runes explode into iridescent life around them. The dying remnants of their dream.

Viktor finds he does not mourn it.

And when Jayce grasps him by the back of the head and reels him in until their foreheads touch, he finds any vestiges of fear evaporate. It’s like being stood on the precipice of the ledge after Sky’s death, her ashes in his hand, his failing heart in his throat, staring down at the water churning below. Alone—so alone.

And then Jayce was there, and the world yawned open once more, wide and bright.

When the end comes, it is Jayce’s eyes he sees, warm and limned with gold.

Chapter Text

The last thing Jayce sees before the world whites out is Viktor’s face—healthy and whole and his. In this strange astral space, Viktor is no more machine than Jayce is.

There is no prize for perfection, only an end to pursuit.

Viktor was never defective. Not in his eyes.

In the early days of their partnership, Jayce had found himself routinely intimidated by Viktor’s overt brilliance, his ability to look at a problem, pick it apart, and reconfigure it along new lines. He’d done the same to Jayce, the scorned fuck-up that he’d been, piecing him back together into something shiny and new.

Jayce had idolised him an almost unhealthy amount, this man who had brought him back from the ledge. This man who’d pressed the Hextech stone back into his hand and brought his stagnant dream into roaring, multi-faceted technicolour.

Their paths had diverged, of course. Jayce’s to the machinations of the Piltover council, Viktor’s to his slavish dedication to Hextech, to curing the Undercity of its woes, to curing himself.

Jayce regrets now how little time he spent helping him with that. All those hours lost to politicking he didn’t enjoy, to people seeking only to use and abuse him. Violence was of a different breed in Piltover. It was sneaky and sly. It smiled while it slid the knife in.

But Viktor was different. Unlike the toffs of Piltover’s upper echelons, he harboured no desire for conquest or power, only for progress. He’d been Jayce’s first harbour of safety in shark-infested waters, their lab a place of companionable collaboration where they could both do what they loved best, where Jayce could seek solace from the council, that voracious beast, always asking for more more more.

Jayce wishes, as his forehead kisses Viktor’s and the world implodes in on them, that he’d said any of this when it actually mattered.

Existence is ephemeral, he thinks, but you are no mere blip, Viktor.

When he wakes, it is to a whole new world.

Jayce groans, blinking blearily as he wills his surroundings into focus. He is flat on his back, cold metal beneath him. The air has that faint miasmic quality that is quintessential of the Fissures. His head is pounding, but he forces himself to shift his attention to his left, where he can feel the faint warmth of another body.

“Viktor,” he breathes.

Viktor is already looking at him. His eyes are free of shadow. Brutally clear. Jayce reaches for him on instinct. He is tangible once more—and gloriously human. 

“You’re you,” Jayce says, reverent.

Viktor stares at him for a moment longer. The dim lighting has drawn his features into stark relief. He looks as fragile as blown glass. A danger to no one, surely.

“Viktor—” Jayce begins.

A feminine groan cuts him off.

Jayce scrambles into an upright position so quickly that the world spins. He and Viktor are sprawled on what appears to be some sort of gigantic propeller—sturdy enough, it seems, but also high enough that Jayce’s stomach flips over.

A girl is curled up across from them, her hood pulled up, her face half-shadowed. “Can’t even die right.” She sounds half-hysterical. “Gotta jinx even that up.”

Jayce tenses, then rises uncertainly to his feet, stumbling and fumbling like a newborn colt. His gaze finds the girl as she turns minutely in his direction. He spies a sliver of electric-blue hair, a flash of pestilent pink eyes.

“You,” he hisses.

Jinx has the coiled body of a trap about to spring and the dark, depthless gaze of a deepwater predator, but it’s the smooth contours of her face that bring Jayce to a stuttering halt.

He can only blink at her dumbly for a moment, stunned into silence by her sheer youth. A weapon in the shape of a woman. A terrorist so prolific that the people of Piltover flinch at her mere name. And she doesn’t even look as old as Jayce was when he took his first step into the hallowed halls of the Academy.

“Shit—shit. What is she doing here?” The words are a fearful instinct. They emerge, unbidden, from the part of him that sees blue hair and pink eyes and remembers the feel of Viktor’s body in his arms, shattered against the battering ram of Jinx’s cruelty.

Jinx rises on tremulous arms. She brings up one hand to shield her gaze and squints at them, as though their violent relocation has found them in some sunny oasis Topside, and not deep in the Fissures. “Progress man,” she says in greeting. Her eyes slide left. “Cult robot.” A pause. “Where’s all your metal gone, tin man?”

Viktor smiles weakly. “I must have misplaced it.”

Jinx cackles. “Well, I hope you’re no longer plannin’ on world domination because my backup plan is fucked.”

Viktor winces. His brow ticks up. “Plan?”

Her smile is a slash of quicksilver. “Big magnet.”

Viktor’s lips twitch, which for him is as good as a full-belly laugh. “Powder,” he says with a surprising amount of warmth, “it is nice to meet you with an unclouded mind.”

Jinx scowls. “If your mind were unclouded, Mister Machine Man, you’d know better than to call me that. Some all-knowing messiah you are.”

Jayce eyes Viktor’s side profile in his periphery. He seems to wrestle with something for a moment before settling on a soft, “As you say, Jinx.”

“You cannot possibly be all right with her being here,” Jayce explodes. There’s something in Viktor’s eyes when he looks at the girl that sets his teeth on edge. “She practically killed you, Viktor.”

Jinx blinks. “When did I do that?”

Jayce blinks back. “You cannot be serious. The rocket launcher?”

“Oh,” she says softly. “Boom.”

“Your partner there almost killed all of us,” a new voice cuts in. “I’d say we’re even, all things tallied.”

Jayce sees Jinx whip around at the sound. The movement is unnaturally swift, like Viktor when he’d been more machine than man. Jayce finds himself suppressing a shudder.

Someone emerges from the shadows at the back of the propeller, a tall someone clad in a crop top and spattered liberally with strips of neon paint. Jayce recognises the shock of white hair immediately, but it’s Jinx who whispers, “Saviour Boy?”

Chapter Text

Jinx wonders how she’s found herself here, deposited on the propeller of an air balloon she’d ridden into war mere hours ago.

Isha is everywhere. Skittering along the metal edge toward their tent. Don’t fall, squirt. You’ll go splat. Bundled in a cocoon of blankets in the corner, half-dozing, her little fists wrapped around Jinx’s braids. Sleep tight, spider-girl. I’ll keep the monsters away.

The mercurial nature of Jinx’s old mania has slid into a quiet sort of despair over recent days. It’s so silent now, as though Isha has taken all the noise with her. Strange, for such a quiet girl.

Jinx would do anything to see her, hallucination or otherwise. She wouldn’t even mind if she were mean, like Mylo and Claggor. Anything to see her face, the mischievous, owlish gleam of her eyes, ever curious, ever demanding.

Doesn’t your indifference shame you?

Don’t you feel alone?

Isha never said any of it, verbally or otherwise, but Jinx heard it anyway.

What do you owe to them all, Jinx?

What do you owe to yourself?

That comes to her in Silco’s low baritone, the words smooth-edged, free of any real anger, but no less scathing.

Progress man is looking at her with eyes she’s seen a million times. Shimmer scum. Silco’s mad dog. His gaze is easier to bear than the machine man’s, which is too knowing by half. Easier than Ekko’s, which holds an entire Powder’s worth of expectations.

If only she hadn’t used up all her grenades. She’d blow the lot of them up for fun. Anything to get them to stop fucking looking at her.

“Ekko,” progress man says in surprise. “You’re okay.”

“Jinx came,” Ekko spits. “She came when few others would and brought the rest of Zaun along with her. Without us, you wouldn’t have won. Don’t forget.”

There’s an edge to his tone that makes Jinx sit a little straighter. For the first time, she thinks she sees what the Firelights must have seen in him, that indefinable quality that made him so easy to follow.

Progress man cocks his head. He looks a little baffled, as though Ekko’s defence of her surprises him. “Nothing can make up for what she’s done,” he says. “The bridge, the council—”

“Your Hextech almost ended everything. Spare your judgment, Jayce.”

“We didn’t mean—”

“It doesn’t matter what you meant,” Ekko says sharply. “You Pilties fucked around with things you shouldn’t have fucked around with, and we paid the price. Business as usual, right?”

Progress man falls silent.

“Jayce,” says the machine man, “The boy is right. I have no space to judge anyone here, and I ask that you don’t either. I—” His eyes skew away. “I’ve done far worse.”

Progress man pauses. “You weren’t yourself,” he says carefully.

Jinx snorts. “Spontaneous case of the ol’ homicidal. Been there, machine man.” She glances up at them through her lashes, coy, mocking. “I wasn’t myself either.”

“I’m sorry,” progress man says, immediately furious, “is this funny to you?”

“Soooooort of.” And it is. A little. This fight over who’s the biggest monster. The absurdity of it tickles her. Progress man conceived Hextech. Machine man almost destroyed the whole world. Jinx terrorised an entire city. They’re all awful.

All of them except Ekko. Not the Boy Saviour. Never him. No, his worst crime is trying to save her. He's a repeat offender. 

I think the cycle only ends when you find the will to walk away.

Jinx eyes Ekko askance. He’ll never walk away. It’s not in his nature. Just like it’s not in her nature to attempt something that doesn’t inevitably blow up in her face.

Machine man seems to realise that his partner is reaching previously undiscovered levels of apoplectic rage. “You had a device,” he says to Ekko. “It was Hextech.”

Ekko drags his gaze away from progress man. “The Z-drive. It could rewind time,” he replies. “Four seconds.”

“Remarkable,” machine man breathes.

Ekko flushes a little at that. Stupid boy saviour. Emotions everywhere, spilling all over the place. Same as when he’d stood before her as she’d pulled the pin on the grenade and tried to go boom. Heart on his sleeve. Begging her to stay. She’d realised fairly quickly that something strange was happening. It was only after Ekko had calmed her down that he’d explained the Z-drive.

“How many times did I try?” she’d asked in a croak. She hadn’t spoken in days.

“Too many, Pow—Jinx. Too many. You were determined. You’ve always been determined.”

“Hero complex so chronic it should be fuckin’ diagnosable,” she’d muttered.

“Wanting to protect the people who are…important to you is no sickness.”

Isha with the pistol. Jinx reaching fruitlessly for her, screaming herself raw. “Is when it’s me.”

“I wonder…” machine man says. “You threw the Hextech device, and it transported us elsewhere. We three were together, but Jinx…”

“Fell down a well.” She giggles. “Just like Powder.”

Progress man glances nervously at his partner. Back at Jinx. “A well…?”

“Was trying to save Vi. Monster was gonna get her.”

Machine man’s gaze sharpens. “Where were you?”

“Below the Hexgates. Above whatever was beneath the Hexgates.”

“Something…reacted.”

Jinx quirks a brow. “You don’t say.” Realisation slaps her in the face. “The grenade I used, it had your magic shit in it.”

“You blew yourself up?” Ekko is suddenly at her side, towering over her. His hands are shaking. “Why would you…after everything…”

“I was trying to save Vi,” she repeats quietly. She senses a half-truth tucked away somewhere between the words. Of course she was trying to save Vi, but also...

“Why?”

It’s progress man who speaks this time. Jinx squints at him. “Why what?”

“Why would you try and save Vi?”

Jinx is starting to suspect he’s a bit stupid. “Because big sis wasn’t gonna save herself. Duh.”

“You’re her sister?” Progress man sounds genuinely baffled. How’d this guy get on the council again? “She never said.”

Jinx is too far gone to find this insulting. “Nah, I don’t imagine she did.”

“You expect us to believe you were protecting her? Last I heard, she and Cait were hunting you.”

Jinx shrugs. “Sisters fight.”

“Murder seems a bit extreme.”

He’s baiting her. Jinx refuses to bite. “Everything about me is a bit extreme.”

“Jayce had the Hextech in his wrist,” machine man says, frowning. He turns toward Ekko. “You had your…Z-drive. And Jinx had a Hextech grenade.”

“And she fell into whatever remained of the anomaly beneath the Hexgates,” progress man volleys back.

They’re doing that smart people shit, where they analyse and theorise and rustle up conclusions. X plus Y equals…

Jinx glances around. Not only is she sitting on a propeller that should no longer exist, but it looks different, too. None of Isha’s scribbles. None of her multi-coloured flair. As though she’d never existed.

Ekko seems to be reaching some conclusions of his own. “Alternate dimension,” he says abruptly.

Jinx groans and flops onto her back. “I fuckin' hate magic.”

Chapter Text

“In this world, I was…Powder?” The name is spat from between Jinx’s lips like something rancid.

“Powder, blue-eyed and shimmer-free. Mylo, Claggor, and Vander survived. You never blew up the cannery.” He exhales tremulously. “I need you to know this, Jinx, because I need you to understand that happiness is possible for you. You’re not a jinx. You never were. It’s a story you told yourself, again and again, until it came true.”

Jinx is just staring at him. Her face is wet with silent tears.

“It’s never too late to build something new,” Ekko says.

“I have no one to build something new for.”

Ekko’s hand finds hers. “You do.” He squeezes. He can feel the cool metal of her fake finger. “You do.”

They spend the rest of the night preparing for war. Ekko indulges Jinx when she asks to paint him. He doesn’t mind. He rather likes the idea of her signature colours scrawled all over him. Her hand finds his waist as she marks an X over his heart, and he tries not to lean into it too much, skittish as she is.

He returns the favour with relish. Swipes two lines of neon pink beneath her eyes. He chooses the colour to match the lurid magenta of her irises. So different to that crystalline sky blue, but no less captivating. 

When Jinx asks him to tidy up her hack job of a haircut, he knows it’s a peace offering. Jinx’s hair has always been precious to her, but beyond that, she’s allowing him to take a sharp object very close to her jugular.

He treats her trust like the fragile object it is. Cradles it between both hands. He will not let it break.

He makes her food that she only picks at. He pointedly does not ask what has left her so ruined. He worries even the question will send her skittering off, back into the dark, where he can’t reach her.

It’s the next morning, minutes before take-off, that he makes a fatal mistake.

Jinx is tinkering with the air balloon, making her finishing touches. He is watching her, admiring her side profile, the point of her nose, the soft curve of her lips.

“Why ya staring, Little Man?”

Ekko shakes himself. “I was just…”

She turns to him fully. “I’m not her, y’know. I’m not your precious Powder.”

“I don’t want you to be.” The words escape him in one harried breath. They’re an instinct. And—surprisingly—they’re true. The Powder from the alternate reality was a dream, a mirage in the solitary desert of Ekko’s life, but she felt distinctly unreal to him in a way that Jinx doesn’t. That Powder—without all the death and violence and horror—would probably never fully understand the Ekko he's become, and it would be unfair to expect her to.

Jinx steps closer to him. Her eyes find his in that fearless way of hers. He doesn’t back down. “Then what do you want me to be?”

“You. Just—you.”

Then, in a moment of stupid instinct, he sways toward her, unable to break himself of the urge to kiss her, to know her in this way, if only once.

Jinx’s hand lands on his chest. She shoves him back, and the world rushes back into the space between them, cold and aching.

“Don’t, Ekko,” she says softly. “Or I’ll Jinx you too.”

Not a threat, he realises. A warning.

He steps away.

Ekko never told her that Vi died in the alternate reality. It seemed a cruel detail to include. Besides, when would it ever matter? Oh, the fucking irony.

“Alternate reality,” Jayce says. His eyes have taken on an edge of alarmed panic that has Ekko inching away. “I can’t—it can’t—”

Viktor places a calming hand on his partner’s shoulder. “I don’t think it’s that reality, Jayce.”

Ekko’s gaze flits between them. Heimerdinger had theorised that Jayce had been taken elsewhere during their first foray into the anomaly. Apparently, his experience hadn’t been quite so pleasant as Ekko’s.

“I think this is the world I came to,” Ekko admits quietly.

Jinx’s head snaps in his direction. She’s still flat on her back, as though to prove how little a threat she deems them all. “The one with…”

Ekko nods.

“How d’you know?”

He jerks his head toward the back of the propeller, toward the tent erected there. “When we went through the anomaly last time,” he says to Jayce, “Heimerdinger and I ended up here.” He begins toward the tent as Jinx leaps to her feet, hot on his trail. “And I…Jinx, I should have told you, but I figured it would never matter.”

He pushes into the tent. Three sets of footsteps follow him.

He knows the moment Jinx sees it. The clank of her thick boots against the metal falls abruptly silent.

She shoves past him, staring with dull eyes at the memorial of Vi—the incense, the candles, the picture. Her legs seem to give way beneath her as she falls to her knees.

Jinx presses two fingers to Vi’s face. “She died here?”

Ekko can feel his pulse in his fingertips. “Yes.”

“Then you lied,” she says, her voice eerily monotone. “It’s not a good reality. It’s the worst one of all.”

“The device you constructed,” Viktor says, “How did you do it?”

He and Ekko are hovering just outside the tent, leaving Jinx to her silent vigil. She’s still on her knees before Vi’s memorial, a devotee before an altar. Jayce is staring through the curtains of the tent, something in his countenance troubled. Ekko’s not sure if it’s Vi’s death that bothers him or the image of Jinx there, this supposed monster, so clearly mourning. Neither Jayce nor Jinx have asked yet how Vi died. Ekko really, really hopes the urge doesn’t take either of them anytime soon. That might just send Jinx over the line from grieving to homicidal.

Ekko gives Jinx one more nervous look before focusing his attention on Viktor. “It was made very similarly to most of your devices, I imagine. I just inverted the acceleration rune.”

“Ingenious,” Viktor murmurs. “Why four seconds?”

“Four seconds was the limit. I tried to go further but…things got screwy. Started to break. But back on top of the Hexgates, when I threw the Z-drive at you, four seconds wasn’t enough. I had to try something else. So I grabbed the dial and I—”

“Cranked it,” Jayce and Viktor murmur in tandem.

“Exactly. Thought it would probably blow me up but…”

Jinx scoffs and swivels around, startling him—he hadn’t thought she’d been listening. “And you had the gall to yell at me about blowing myself up. Only okay when you do it, eh, Ekko? Only you get to play the hero?”

Everyone turns to look at her, and she seems to curl in on herself on instinct, as though to protect whatever part of herself she has unwittingly exposed.

“You said things started to break when you turned the dial past four seconds, yeah?” she continues. “Any chance that might translate into, y’know, breaking literal reality?”

Viktor looks at Jayce; Jayce looks back.

“Shit,” Jayce says.

“Yes,” Viktor replies faintly. “Shit indeed.”

Chapter Text

Jayce dreams often of Ambessa Medarda.

Not as she was in the end when she brought the Noxians hammering at the gates, but as the woman he first met, the woman he’d considered little more than the leader of a far-off nation, mother of Mel, someone he’d come to admire deeply.

That perception had been irrevocably altered the day she’d requested a one-on-one meeting with him.

He’d met her at the baths as she lazed in languor, her head tipped back, a masseuse at her shoulders. She’d been naked, he fully clothed, and yet it had left him with a distinct feeling of vulnerability.

He’d been a fool, extolling the virtues of Academy life to her, effusively telling her that he was no stranger to failure, as though that would ever convince a woman like her.

She’d taken one look at him and seen his truth, seen a heart so unprotected, so soft and malleable. Ambessa Medarda was a connoisseur of innocence, and he’d been a veritable feast.

I fear you’ll end up like General Parlec, slaughtered with your eyes closed.

It wasn’t until Jinx’s rocket had hit the Council chambers that Jayce had begun to understand.

His eyes are open now, and he doesn’t like what he sees.

Jinx rises slowly from her perch. Her back is heaving erratically, as though she’s swallowing sobs. Jayce is watching her, and Viktor is watching him. His gaze is shuttered in a way Viktor is unused to. Jayce is usually such an open book—at least to him. But not now. Not since he returned from that broken reality, borderline crippled, half-mad with isolation and fear and a knowledge too awful to contain within a sole human mind.

Viktor wonders what his parallel counterpart had been thinking, dumping the entire world’s fate on Jayce’s shoulders.

It has forced Jayce—warm, steadfast Jayce—to grow colder and less predictable, and he hates it.

“There’s a problem,” Ekko says quietly.

Viktor turns to him. The boy intrigues him, if only because of his foray into this alternate timeline, where his mind proved sharp enough to conceive an original Hextech device. To Viktor, he encapsulates Zaun in all its fierce force—scrappy and sly—the sort of boy who will turn a situation to his advantage with few resources and his back against a wall.

Jinx laughs at Ekko’s proclamation, but the sound is humourless. “Yeah, little man, I’d sure say so.”

“No—well, yes. But—”

“What is it, Ekko?” asks Jayce.

“When I was here last time, my consciousness sorta…took over the body of the Ekko that already exists here. This time, however…”

“You arrived as your original self, in your original body,” Viktor murmurs, his inventor’s brain already beginning to assemble and disassemble ideas. Two versions of the same person in one timeline…some sort of temporal displacement…too much matter in one reality…

“Jinx exists here, too,” Ekko continues, an edge of caution to his tone. “But she also arrived in her own body.” There’s a breath of relief in that statement that Viktor notes, an implied thank God.

“Jinx doesn’t exist here,” says Jinx harshly. “Powder exists here. Just like Powder doesn’t exist in our reality.”

Ekko glances at her, pained. “Jinx—”

“Powder was weak,” she says sharply. “Powder died.”

Viktor doesn’t interrupt. He senses this conversation is too fragile to interrupt. He recalls the Powder that existed in Vander’s mind, an energetic sprite of a girl, a talented tinkerer, a spitfire sister, a daydreamer of a daughter. Viktor had sensed in Vander’s fractured thoughts that he did not see Jinx and Powder as two different people. He didn’t really see Jinx and Powder at all. He saw his daughter—no more, no less. To him, it was as simple as that, and protecting her, no matter what she called herself, was an instinct as automatic as breathing. To Jinx, however, the incongruous nature of her two identities seems to have embedded itself like a tumour, something malignant and metastasising.

Viktor understands only too well.

“Wonder if we exist here, Vik,” Jayce murmurs.

Ekko’s expression turns a bit shifty at that. “Maybe,” he says, but it sounds like a lie.

“I can’t say for sure, but I would assume the presence of you two as entirely separate people suggests the reality is more unstable this time,” Viktor muses. “The transition wasn’t clean, wasn’t efficient. There’s…there’s too much.”

“Too much?” Ekko asks.

“Too much you. Too much stuff.”

Ekko still looks lost, but Jayce is nodding, keeping pace with him, as he always has. “But what do you think it means for us?”

“Eh, nothing good. Our mere presence here has broken some fundamental laws. It could destabilise this reality—or us—or both.”

“Didn’t your Hextech break fundamental laws?” Ekko asks, and to his credit, he sounds only mildly accusatory.

“Not precisely,” Viktor tells him. “Our work brought science and magic into harmony. This…this is discordant.”

“Pfft, harmony my ass,” scoffs Jinx. “Your math-y magic brought a whole lotta discordance, machine man.”

“My name is Viktor,” he says mildly.

Jinx smiles. “I know.”

“You ask that I call you Jinx, your chosen name, and not Powder. I ask only that you extend me the same courtesy.” He’s entering risky territory. He can tell by the sudden gleam in Jinx’s eyes.

“Nah.”

“May I ask why not?”

Jinx seems to struggle for a moment before settling on, “Machine man—that’s just a joke. But calling me Jinx…it’s important.”

“Why?”

“Because Jinx is…Jinx is me.”

“It’s a prophecy,” Viktor realises.

Jinx flinches as though slapped.

And he knows it’s not his place, knows she’s mercurial and unstable enough to lash out on a whim, at any perceived provocation, but still, Viktor finds himself saying, “That prophecy…it’s self-fulfilling. There’s no such thing as fate. You forge your own destiny. You can be the arbiter of your own pain—or suffering.”

He can feel Jayce watching him, confused, from his place at his side. Viktor realises Jayce doesn’t know anything about Vander, not who he was, nor what Viktor tried to do for him. It’s a difficult thing to explain; this bond forged between himself and the people he thought he was healing—Vander in particular. Viktor spent days upon days wading through the wreckage of Vander's mind and unravelling the few things of beauty that remained (Vi’s hands in his gauntlets, clownishly large on her skinny arms; Powder’s laugh, her girlish joy, an echo of Felicia), then separating them from the urges of the beast (blood, blood, blood). He feels, perhaps irrationally, that after all the pain he’s caused and the fate he unwittingly led Vander to, he owes the man something.

Helping his daughter in some small way seems a good place to start.

“I didn’t live properly when I had the chance,” he continues, “and then it was too late, and I got desperate."

“And became a cult leader,” Jinx says.

“Yes.” He smiles at her indulgently. “I became a cult leader.”

Jinx winks at him conspiratorially. “Not to brag or anything, but I became a bit of a cult leader too.” She motions to her hair. “The Jinxers, y’know.”

Viktor is starting to suspect that Jinx is not taking what he intended from this conversation.

She sighs. “So that’s it, I suppose. Two options. Death or godhood.”

“That’s not quite what I—”

“Thanks for the talk, Viktor. I feel much better.”

Incidentally, Viktor feels worse.

Jayce is still staring at him, incredulous. 

Viktor shrugs. "Eh, at least she called me Viktor." 

Chapter Text

Jinx hears what the machine man says, even if she pretends she doesn’t, even if she plays the fool. Death or godhood wasn’t the point of his tirade. The point was her and the cycle she finds herself locked in, like Ekko with that stupid Z-drive—a pointlessly repeating loop. There’s only one way to break it. She has to stop pulling the ripcord.

Except she doesn’t know how. Pulling the ripcord is automatic by now. Pull. Act. Pull. Act. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Same input; same output. Dance, monkey.

Jinx refuses to explain this to a guy she hardly knows, a guy who headed a cult and tried to take over the world with a shitload of robots. Machine man—Viktor—wants to lecture her about free will and manifesting your own desired reality and blah blah blah, as though his entire robot agenda wasn’t built on the stealing of said free will. Must be easy to proselytise to the masses about good life choices when your own ascension to godhood goes sideways.

Fuckin priceless.

“Soooooo, what now?” she says. “We kinda know why we’re here—anomalies, your guys’ magic shit, etcetera—and we know it’s probably bad for this place that we’re here—nothin’ new there, I’ve been toxic to every environment I’ve ever walked into—but what are we gonna do about it?”

“We?” demands progress man. “I have no plans to work with a terrorist.”

Jinx tuts. “Judgy. I had no plans to work with a big whiny baby with shit for brains, but beggars can’t be choosers, progress man.”

“We almost broke one reality, Jayce,” Viktor says quietly. “I’d rather not break another. And that will require all of us. I suggest we put aside our enmities for a later date.”

Jinx sighs. “Oh, Vik, you’re way too logical to be best friends with this loser.”

Progress man looks like he’s biting back a number of expletives. “Fine,” he bites out. “Just—fine. We need to find a way back.” He turns to Ekko. “How did you do it last time?”

Ekko rubs awkwardly at the back of his neck. “I—well, I used the remnants from a Hextech explosion. Heimerdinger helped. Powder, too—the parallel version of Jinx.”

Jinx stiffens. She hates the way he says Powder. Precious Powder. Perfect Powder. Shimmer-free and sane and toothless. There’s scorn when Jinx thinks of her, sure, but also a serrated-edged sort of panic. When the monsters come for that Powder, she won’t stand a chance. And if there’s one thing Jinx knows, it’s that monsters always come.

“Hextech explosion?” Viktor inquires.

“There’s no Hextech in this world,” Ekko says. His gaze skews away. “Something bad happened early on, some explosion that killed a kid, and that was it. I filched what I could from the remains.”

“The Hextech killed a kid?” progress man echoes. His face has bled of all its colour. This is why Jinx spent so much time and effort divesting herself of all her pesky feelings. At least when her shit blows up, all of that shame and guilt is muted. Doesn’t cripple her in the same way it seems to cripple progress man.

“If you used all the Hextech during your first visit, then it stands to reason that there’s none left,” Viktor muses.

“Stuck in a trap,” Jinx singsongs. “Only way to escape is to gnaw off your leg.”

Progress man and Viktor blink at her in alarm. Ekko says, “We’ll consider that if things get truly desperate, Jinx.”

She drifts away from them, increasingly bored with the conversation. It all feels a bit daft. Hextech got them into this mess, but it can’t get them out. She’ll let the geniuses run themselves ragged as they flesh out just how thoroughly they’re fucked.

“…could go back to the place you found the original remnants,” she hears progress man say. “You could have missed some.”

Jinx retreats into the tent and pulls the curtain closed. She needs a modicum of space. Not from Ekko, but from the dynamic wonder duo. Having them here, in the parallel version of what was once her and Isha’s space, is beginning to make her edgy. She feels invaded. She feels watched. Probably doesn't help that fifteen-year-old Vi is just fucking staring at her. Jinx isn’t sure how long she stares back before she feels someone step into the space with her.

“Wonder boys finished chasing their tails yet?” she asks without turning. 

Ekko exhales. “Not yet."

"Cooked up any solutions in their big brains?"

"Nope."

"Colour me shocked." 

Ekko huffs a half-laugh. 

Jinx whirls to face him. “Looks like we’re stuck here then," she says. "Maybe it won’t be too bad to stick around. I could make a career change. Masseuse? Hmm…no. Too hands-on. Could open a bar, I s’pose.”

“Oh yeah?” His gaze flits across her face. “What would you call it?”

“Blisters and Bedrock.” Her response is immediate. She leans toward him a little. “You could be co-owner, y’know.”

“I could, could I?”

She nods decisively. “You’d be bedrock, strong and stalwart, and I’d be blisters.”

“Proof of hard work?” Ekko says. He’s not smiling yet, but there’s a crinkle around his eyes that tells Jinx it’s a near thing. 

She grins. “The pain that appears once the tough shit's done.”

That draws a laugh from him. It’s a nice sound, one she hasn’t heard in forever, free of any malice or anger. His eyes are glistening with mirth as they meet hers, dark and warm and kind. How hasn’t the world beaten it out of him? Jinx wonders dumbly. How has such abject kindness persisted?

“I like your eyes,” she blurts.

Ekko falls abruptly silent. Jinx wants to smack herself. It’s such an unbelievably juvenile thing to say. But he was looking at her, all sweet and amused, and she’d just wanted to divest herself of that yucky affection in her chest and force him to deal with it instead. Except now he’s looking at her like she’s insane—well, more insane than usual, and—

“I like your eyes, too.”

The recriminatory spiel in Jinx’s head draws to a stuttering halt. “They’re not blue,” she says stupidly.

“I know.” Ekko’s hand gently traces her jaw. “I like them anyway.” 

His mouth finds hers. It’s an immediate wet slide: mouth against mouth, tongue against tongue.

Jinx feels an instinctive urge to step away, to make space between them. For years, she’s felt no soft touch but Silco’s, and even then, only his bare minimum of paternalism. A hug here, a hand on the shoulder there. Anything more was initiated by her, great heapings of her affection that she felt like he tolerated only because he didn’t want to set off her hair-trigger temper. She’d sit in his lap while she stabbed the shimmer shot into his eye. Something to sweeten what was a sour situation for both of them. Sometimes he’d hold her after nightmares while she bawled and generally acted a terror—batshit Jinx—but the gestures often felt mechanical and disingenuous.

Isha—the name spears through her—was a different creature entirely. Jinx shared handshakes with her, the odd embrace when lives were on the line, but she’d tried her best to maintain some distance. Hadn’t wanted to jinx her. Fat lot of good that did.

Any other touches in Jinx’s life have been instigated with the intention to hurt, not help. Violence as communication. Her back against the stone of the altar, Vi hovering above, a dynamo of force ready to tear her throat out with her bare teeth.

Ekko’s hand on her jaw is soft. His mouth is an open invitation. And her body wants this. Oh, how her body wants this.

She kisses him back carefully. She feels as though one of them might break. It’s a rule—something the universe is owed. Surely a touch as nice as this must end in carnage.

He makes a soft sound against her lips—a light gasp. She echoes it, her hand scrabbling for some sort of purchase and finding his waist.

Your mind is a chaotic masterpiece, but your heart must be a steel trap.

Jinx pushes Ekko away with a wince as Silco’s voice begins chiselling away at her thoughts.

Jinx, you must be stronger than to fall prey to the frailties of a human heart.

“I’m not,” she murmurs.

“Jinx,” Ekko says. He sounds incredibly far away.

“Don’t—you can’t—I’ll hurt you. I won’t even mean to.”

“Jinx, you won’t—”

“Like Isha! Like Isha. You’ll just go boom, like everything good does.”

She stumbles away from him as the demons swoop in. Mylo is cackling, bent double, a mocking finger aimed in her direction. Claggor is silent; his goggles are snapped clean in two.

“No, no, no.”

She wheels further backwards. Her spine hits something—Vi’s pissy little memorial, she realises vaguely. Something tips over and hits the floor with a colossal crash. From her periphery, Jinx sees three baubles spill out of a bag. Blue, like her hair, like her eyes before the shimmer rewired her, like—

“The Hextech crystals,” Ekko breathes. “She had them the whole time.”

Jinx grins. The world finally goes quiet. “Naughty, naughty Powder.”

Chapter Text

“Hey, you guys should probably see this,” says Ekko.

Viktor turns as the boy steps out of the tented area housing Vi’s memorial, Jinx at his side. She raises a cautious hand, unveiling the Hextech crystals balanced in her palm.

Viktor sucks in a sharp breath and staggers back a step, surprised by the sudden surge of terror that threatens to tow him under. It all started here, with those crystals—untapped, unrefined apocalyptic power.

“Viktor—”

There is a hand bracing him all of a sudden. Strong. Steadying.

“Viktor,” Jayce says. His voice is soft. His eyes are molten gold. “It’s all right.”

Viktor chokes on a breath. “Those crystals—”

“I understand,” Jayce says. His voice is calm, but his hand atop Viktor’s shoulder carries a faint tremor.

And he does understand, Viktor realises. Of course Jayce understands. These crystals are the origin of their greatest sin. In this primitive form, the Hextech is still unstable and amorphous, waiting to be directed, to be moulded. It represents who Viktor once was, with all his untried potential, with all his curiosity and naive idealism. Hoping to cure Zaun’s ills with god-like power.

He thinks of his broken body, perverted by the Grey, growths metastasising in his lungs. A tragedy in slow motion. He thinks of his promise to himself, to Jayce, to Zaun: no more tragedies.

“You have the crystals,” Jayce murmurs.

“Powder does,” Jinx says. There’s something self-satisfied in her tone. Viktor doesn’t have the presence of mind to untangle it.

“Will these be enough?” Jinx asks. “To magic us home?”

Ekko sighs. “Should be. Z-drive will have to be constructed from scratch, though.”

“May I?” Viktor asks, holding out a hand. He pretends it isn’t shaking.

Jinx hesitates for a moment before cautiously handing him the crystals. Her gaze meets his with surprising canniness. “You all right there, machine man?”

Viktor eyes her as he carefully takes the Hextech crystals. Her shrewdness surprises him, though perhaps it shouldn’t. If anyone else aside from him and Jayce could understand the cost of these crystals, it would be her.

Viktor had seen the price they had exacted from Jinx and her family in Vander’s memory of the cannery (everything burning hot as the world blazed around him, like the knife as it slid into his gut, like Silco’s shimmer-bright eye). Vander hadn’t understood what had caused such a devastating explosion, hadn’t understood the origin of the sudden calamitous flash of blue, but Viktor did.

“I am fine, Jinx,” Viktor says softly. He skews his gaze toward Ekko, trying to draw his mind back to business. “You said you inverted the acceleration rune to make your…Z-drive?”

The boy nods.

“Ah.” Viktor murmurs. “I think I understand now.”

“Annihilation,” Jayce realises.

Ekko frowns. “Annihilation?”

“When your Z-drive hit Viktor and me, it was brought into contact with its counterpart," Jayce explains. "I had Hextech in my wrist, and Vik—Vik practically was Hextech at that point. Our Hextech was built with the acceleration rune as its most basic function, and when it met with its inverted counterpart…”

“It self-annihilated,” Viktor says. He snaps his fingers. “Like matter and anti-matter. If they meet, they self-annihilate.”

“Go boom,” whispers Jinx.

Viktor nods. “Crude, but yes, in essence.”

“Still doesn’t help us with this shitshow, tin man.”

“Eh, it doesn’t, but it does tell us that there’s no Hextech left in our dimension. If it self-annihilated, then it’s all gone. Forever.” Viktor finds himself glancing at Jayce. He’s relieved. He tells himself that’s the whole of it. “But to make Hextech in this dimension…”

Jayce shrugs a bit helplessly. “What else can we do?”

“We could—”

“Quiet,” Jinx hisses. Her tone is harsh enough that Viktor clamps his mouth shut on instinct. She cocks her head; her eyes are lit with that strange miasmic glow. “Can you hear that?”

Viktor strains his ears. He hears nothing, but his body has never been in perfect operational condition.

“Jinx…” Ekko says. He reaches a hand toward her, which she sharply sidesteps. “Are you sure you’re not—”

“I’m not—I’m not hearing things. I don’t think?” Her eyes dart left to right. Her nostrils flare. Viktor cannot help but think of a predator scenting prey.

He glances at Jayce, who looks equally confused. “I don’t hear anything,” he says.

“Jinx—” Ekko begins, then abruptly cuts himself off.

By the time the rest of them do hear it, it’s already too late.

Something metal—a canister, Viktor thinks—rolls out of the shadows and along the edge of the propeller. The creak of footsteps follows it.

The canister is hissing, dispelling some sort of gas into the air. Viktor sees Jinx dart for it with startling rapidity. She’s quick—quicker than any average human could hope to be—but the damage is already done. Viktor feels himself choke. A hand latches onto his, and Viktor squeezes hard, recognising the contours of Jayce’s calluses.

Through the sudden smoky haze, Viktor sees Jinx reach for her belt, grasping for a weapon that is no longer there.

Viktor falls to his knees, coughs wracking his entire body. He can hear the other’s coughing too. Hears Ekko faintly call Jinx’s name.

Then—silence.

Viktor strains fruitlessly to stay conscious, covering his mouth with his free hand. He hears the clank of more footsteps. Sees two silhouettes cut through the smog.

“Take the boy,” says a voice. A pause then, “The one with the blue shit too.”

It’s the last thing Viktor hears before he succumbs to unconsciousness.   

Jinx comes to slowly. Her thoughts are thick as molasses for a moment, then the memories come flooding back, and everything picks back up at double speed.

She glances frantically around, hoping to see Ekko, but only progress man remains. He’s sat across from her, propped up on his elbows, looking at her with bleary eyes.

“No, no, no!” Jinx feels herself curl up, feels herself wither. She’s faintly aware that she’s rocking herself back and forth, the way she’s been doing since childhood—a fruitless effort to self-soothe.

Gone. Ekko’s gone. Gone like Silco. Gone like Vander and Mylo and Claggor. Gone like Isha. She fucking jinxed him, and now he’s gone. This, she thinks, is punishment for kissing him. Kiss of death. Well done, Jinx. 

“Jinx?” a cautious voice says.

Jinx lifts her head slowly. Through hazy eyes, she sees progress man. He’s watching her very carefully, as though she’s one of her monkey bombs, liable to explode at any given moment.

“They took him,” she says in a small voice.

Progress man runs a hand through his hair. His eyes are shadowed. “Yeah. Vik, too.”

Jinx clenches and unclenches her hands compulsively, trying to force feeling back into her extremities. “Why?” It’s a child’s plea.

“I don’t know. I didn’t see them. Only their silhouettes. I don’t understand—” He pauses briefly, considering. “Why them and not us?”

Progress man’s adherence to logic is beginning to calm her a bit, although she’d die before admitting it.

“I don’t know,” she says slowly. “But they took them. Which means they’re alive. For now.” She’d done the same in the past—taken people as a message, or a hostage, or because they had something she needed. She’d never really thought before about the people she’d taken them from. Jinx supposes she’s overdue for punishment in that regard, but she finds it monumentally unfair that Ekko is being punished too.

“Ekko…” She trails off. She’s not even sure why she’s speaking. “He deserves better.” Jinx pushes herself carefully to her feet. She still feels a bit out of it, all hazy-minded and jelly-legged. “Jinxed it,” she murmurs.

Progress man looks at her sharply. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that Ekko described this world to me. He told me how wonderful it was. Made it sound borderline fuckin’ perfect. I grace his lovely little alternate dimension with my presence for less than an hour and bad shit starts to happen.”

Progress man opens his mouth. Closes it. “I blame you for an awful lot, Jinx, but even I don’t see how this could be your fault.”

Jinx laughs, the sound half manic. “You wouldn’t. You haven’t seen it. You think everything I’ve done was intentional. Some of it was; plenty of it wasn’t. I touch things, and they start to come undone.” 

Progress man is quiet for a moment. When Jinx dares to glance up at him, he is already looking at her. There is something contemplative in his expression. Something a bit confused. Jinx imagines it’s the same way he looks at his fancy-pants inventions when they’re not functioning as predicted. 

“I…don’t understand,” he finally says.

Jinx thinks of Mylo. Spits a distorted echo of his words back at progress man. “Could fill a whole damn library with all the things you don’t understand.”

Progress man doesn’t let her acidity deter him. “I see you now,” he says. “With Vi’s memorial. With Ekko. I see your humanity. And I wonder why you did it.”

For once, progress man’s voice isn’t scathing. He’s looking at her with pathetically earnest eyes. There’s something very Vi about him, Jinx thinks. An approach that relies on tackling something with brute force, all feelings and forthrightness, without caution, without guile.

“Why I did what?” she croaks.

“All of it. But the council—the council sticks out.”

“That’s a very complicated question.”

“Answer it anyway.”

Jinx tries to muster some indignation at the demand, but she’s seeing Vi again. Vi’s steeliness. Vi’s unrelenting grit.

“Your solution was a solid one, progress man.” She quirks a brow. Her voice turns a little mincing, a little mocking. “I heard you didn’t even haggle. But you made a critical miscalculation: Silco was never going to hand me over. You didn’t know that. I didn’t know that. And I—” Thought I was going to be betrayed by someone I loved again.

Jinx shakes herself. “I could tell you any number of things that would all be true, but the crux is this: I was hurting, and I wanted you to hurt too.”

Progress man is just looking at her. She can’t tell if he respects her more or less for her answer.

“It’s the same reason Vi’s squeeze was oh-so eager to release the Grey back into Zaun. She was hurting, and she wanted us to hurt back.”

Jayce blinks at her. “You’re empathising with Cait?”

“Empathising with Miss Cupcake ‘War Crimes’ Kiramman? No. I’m saying I understand, not that I empathise. I aimed fire at you in your fancy little tower from my filthy hole in the ground. Cupcake was steppin’ on the necks of people who already couldn’t breathe.”   

“You hurt far more people than Cait.”

“What’s this? A fuckin’ competition, Piltie?” Jinx stalks toward him. “How many new malformations will there be this year, do you think, from the extra exposure to the Grey? I’ve seen five-year-olds cough up lungs from the chemicals.”

Jayce blinks. Uncurls his fists. “I didn’t think—I didn’t know.”

“Yeah, Piltie, you don’t know. For years, while you and your partner were tinkering in your metal oasis, Zaun boiled alive, and you let it.”

Jinx is breathing heavily. She’s furious, and the intensity of it blindsides her. She’s at least a bit ashamed to admit how few fucks she gave about Zaun until recent months. Back with Silco, she’d hummed as he’d ranted about independence, murmured responses into his silences, all whilst thinking about the future opportunities it would provide for her to make more things go boom. Her mind had been too tangled with mania and hate to care about the intricacies of Zaun’s plight beyond bombing the shit out of its enemies.

It’s why Ekko could never get through to her, get her to see his bigger picture. There had been no bigger picture for Jinx beyond clawing her way into the next day.

Then…Isha…

Isha had opened Jinx’s eyes. Reminded her of all the fucked up, abandoned, orphaned, disenfranchised kids out there with no real futures. They needed an independent and functioning Zaun. Needed food, clean air, water, and protection. Needed Piltover to stop flooding their streets with those blue-clad cunts and start restituting them for the decades of suffering they had inflicted.

It was as though all of Silco’s hard-won lessons had come roaring back. Kids like Isha needed to see Zaun ushered into a new era. People like progress man, who had ignored years’ worth of opportunities to implement real change, were antithetical to that.

“I…” Progress man clears his throat. Tries again. “I can acknowledge that there’s plenty we don’t know about one another—and plenty we could blame each other for. But…all of that aside, Viktor and Ekko are in danger, and they need us.”

“Right-o!” Jinx reaches instinctively for her belt before mournfully dropping her hands. “I need a gun.”

Progress man looks unduly alarmed by this.

“Oh, man up, you fuckin' wimp. Do you want to save your kidnapped boyfriend or not?”

Progress man blinks at her. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

Jinx just looks at him, sceptical. “Does he know that? Do you know that?”

“He’s—Viktor is my partner.”

“In life?”

“In science.”

“That some sorta kink I don’t know about?”

“Kink?! I don’t—”

“If it’s the memory of his metallic alter ego that gets you going, I know Babette’s caters to all tastes. I’ve seen robotic types roll in and out of her doors at all hours. Literally roll. No shame here.”

“No,” Jayce says in a hiss. “His ‘metallic alter ego’ is not what gets me going—”

“Is it the fact he’s a dude? Cuz if so, you’re weird.”

“NO! Not at all. I like Viktor in all his forms. That’s not—”

“All his forms?” Jinx rolls her eyes. “Man, you’re whipped.”

“I am not.”

“Admit it, progress man. You and Ekko are both smitten with terrorists. Hey! You could form a support group.”

Progress man looks up at her, and Jinx expects some scathing comment about terrorists, about how dare she compare herself to his beloved Viktor. But all he says is, “I am not smitten with Viktor.”

“Whatever you say, progress man.” Jinx grins—sharp, hateful. Progress man visibly shudders. “Let’s go find the fuckers who stole our boyfriends.”

She holds out a hand to help him to his feet. It’s a peace offering—and a test. Progress man seems to realise this.

He meets her gaze properly for the first time, unflinching, and takes her hand.

Chapter Text

Viktor comes to with a sickening lurch. His head is pounding something fierce; he can hear his pulse in his ears. Bum-bum, bum-bum. It takes him a moment to recognise what he is feeling—to realise he is afraid.

The Machine Herald had not felt fear, just as he had not felt most emotions. Every sensation experienced had been an echo of the real thing, a paltry imitation. To feel such excessive panic now is almost embarrassing. Viktor is a Zaunite. Even sickly, he used to be made of sterner stuff.

It’s that thought that kicks his brain into gear. He wills his vision into focus and begins to catalogue his surroundings. It’s the smell he notices first, a faintly sterile odour, as of something recently bleached. The room is dim, lit only by the dull miasmic green glow of a chemtech lamp, but the dark overhead strip lights give the impression of somewhere intended to be well-illuminated. The walls are grey—the sort of grey that creeps into everything in Zaun. Off-colour.

Viktor himself is on the floor, attached via handcuff to a cold metal table leg. He turns his head and sees that the desk is dented, as though something of considerable weight has been thrown at it. His reflection looks back at him in the metal, distorted. 

This is a lab, he realises. It’s well-cared for despite the worn apparatus. The lab of someone who knows their craft, who loves it. Viktor’s familiar with such spaces. He and Jayce had once painstakingly curated their own lab, after all. Viktor finds himself missing the simplicity of it. A time when the lab was the sum of his world.

There is a soft sound to his left—a heavy exhalation—and Viktor whips his head toward it, immediately alert. He lets out a breath of relief when he realises it is Ekko, similarly trussed up and bound to the desk opposite. He is still unconscious, his limbs splayed at awkward angles. It makes Viktor cringe. He’ll be in pain tomorrow. If he’s lucky, that is. If he’s unlucky, and their captors have more malicious intentions, he’ll no longer be feeling anything at all.

Viktor is shamefully glad not to be alone.

The sound of distant footsteps has him straightening as best he can from his indignified slump. The footsteps are light, meandering. The sound of someone with all the time in the world.

Viktor had somehow forgotten this feeling—being the Machine Herald had stripped him of its necessity—but he recalls it now. The vulnerability. The cowering fear of a prey animal. He had shed these things like a snake's skin and left the useless carcass behind. Fear had become a triviality. He was as close to invulnerable as any creature could be. What had he to fear?

It’s incredible how near-sighted all that knowledge made him.

The footsteps draw to a halt as a figure steps into the room. It is a slight figure, sharply drawn. Their shadow is stretched out long and gaunt behind them as they hover just in front of the doorway. 

Viktor recognises him immediately.

It is Singed who stands before him, although less singed—heh—than in the other timeline.

“Viktor,” the doctor says. There is a surprising softness in his eyes. Viktor feels immediately off-footed. Vertiginous. “Forgive me, but I saw your corpse many years past, yet here you sit, alive. A true paradox.”

Viktor blinks at him blearily. “My…corpse?”

“I snuck Topside to check it was really true. Heimerdinger’s stalwart assistant—dead. I was informed the growths in your lungs had finally gotten the better of you.”

Viktor tries to slot this knowledge into place alongside everything else. Ekko had said that Hextech killed a child early on in this reality. Viktor recalls standing in the skeleton of Jayce’s blown-up apartment, the debris of Jayce’s dream scattered around him. He recalls the sheriff telling him that no one had been seriously hurt. A couple of Enforcers had sustained minor injuries in pursuit of the Zaunite children who had supposedly been responsible for the break-in, but Viktor had not cared overmuch about the well-being of bluebellies chasing desperate children back down into the dark. The kids, he had been assured, had all escaped unscathed.

But that had been in an entirely different reality. What had happened in this one?

He can see now how easily a child could have died. A single misstep, a person standing just a hair too close to the Hexcrystal. A child exploded like the outer wall of the apartment, strewn about carelessly like the rest of the detritus.

It had been young Powder in that apartment. He knows this from Vander’s memories of the explosion at the cannery. The blue of it; the magnitude of its destructive force. Only one thing could cause such devastation, and Powder had filched it from Jayce’s apartment.

Viktor closes his eyes. Violet’s memorial flashes in the black of his mind. He holds it there, stunned, sickened. He understands now, and he wishes he didn’t. Oh, Jayce. What did you do?

Jayce would have certainly been exiled for such a thing. Likely not for the sake of one Zaunite life but for the danger his inventions posed. Viktor, for all his ceaseless ambition, would not have been willing to involve himself with Jayce’s research if it had been responsible for the death of an Undercity child.

Perhaps, when Jayce had stood amongst the wreckage of his once-home and found himself teetering at the edge, Viktor had not been there to stop him.

It nauseates him to imagine it. A reality in which all of Jayce’s brilliance ends up splattered against a pristine Piltover sidewalk.

Perhaps Jinx was right. Perhaps this is not a very good reality after all.

“You look unwell, Viktor,” Singed remarks. His voice is coldly clinical. “Is it the knowledge of your death?”

Viktor blinks at him. Singed’s face looks almost naked, without all of those ghastly burns. Viktor says, “I have been forced to look death in the eye many times." (His limbs twisted into unnatural shapes, his body buried beneath rubble. A hammer, cradled in oh-so-familiar hands; a sudden hole punched through his heart. A Hextech impossibility, an acceleration rune in miniature, hauled defiantly in his face.) “I will no longer flinch away from it.”

Singed cocks his head. His right hand finds his pocket but does not reemerge. He seems to be fingering something. Viktor can just make out the outline of some sort of spherical object. “You seem different to the Viktor I knew.”

“I am different.”

“Why, of course! He is dead, and you—you are very much not.”

Viktor can tell this intrigues the doctor. There is an almost manic light in his eerie, pale eyes. It is all he has ever wanted, after all: to defy death. “Will you tell me how you did it?”

“I didn’t. He isn’t me.” Viktor doesn’t elaborate. It seems a poor idea to give a man such as Singed knowledge of parallel worlds.

“He is a version of you,” Singed says cannily. He is too clever by half.

“Perhaps,” Viktor allows. “Doctor, why have you brought us here?”

“I had heard tell of something in the Lanes—a form of energy so efficient it could manipulate time. A Zaunite boy presented it for the Distinguished Innovator’s Competition. He won, of course; everyone was very impressed. I, myself, could hardly believe it. Time manipulation. That is beyond science. It is almost magic.”

Singed’s eyes are still backlit with that ungodly glow. It brings to mind Viktor’s foray into the dark labyrinth of the doctor’s head the day he visited the commune. It had been a startlingly complex place, as meandering and obscure as the man himself. Mercurial, too. A bit changeable. Restless. The mind of a man who never sits still. The only constant was the girl in the glass coffin. She had been entombed in his memory like an insect in amber: perfectly preserved, starkly vibrant.

The coffin had seemed absurd to Viktor at the time, almost laughable, like something from a children’s fairytale. Singed’s hope that she could be saved from certain death, too, seemed tinged with fantastical inconceivability. The fact that his old mentor was given to such flights of fancy surprised him. Defying death. It was an impossibility. An atrocity.

(Viktor would go on to commit some impossible atrocities of his own.) 

“Only mages can do magic,” Viktor finally manages. His voice is unsteady. “It’s rather in the name.”

Singed’s lips quirk; Viktor has amused him. “You’re very clever, Viktor. Perhaps one of the cleverest individuals I have ever known.” His hand retracts from his pocket, and between two fingers, he presents a Hexcrystal. It seems luridly blue in the dim light. Mocking. “I have worked alongside so many clever men,” he says, eyeing the crystal with a slitted gaze. “They have nearly always scorned me eventually. They find my methods too extreme; they find my devotion crass. But that has meant nothing in the end.

“Take Heimerdinger, for example. We parted ways. He stayed with the council and did what politicians do best: stagnate. And in that time, he produced nothing, gained nothing. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I heard that he had disappeared entirely. Swallowed by Zaun, like so many others.”

Singed says all this with impeccable apathy; he has never been one to express excessive pride. Still, Viktor senses something smug in his countenance, a subtle I told you so.

I have known clever men before, is what Viktor hears. I have outlived them all.

I have pushed them to the edge.

I have watched them fall.

“That crystal,” Viktor says cautiously, “you don’t understand—it’s not what you think it is. It does not heal. It only destroys.”

Singed’s expression remains unperturbed. “Your friend used it to manipulate time. That does not seem a destructive thing.”

“You don’t know what I know.” Viktor tugs at his binds so roughly that the metal scores into his skin. “You haven’t seen what I’ve seen.”

Singed’s eyes are alight. “Progress is pain,” he says.

“Only for some.”

“Yes,” Singed allows. “Only for some.”

Viktor takes a desperate, gasping breath. “It will not cure your daughter.”

Singed freezes. Blinks.

(A skeletal hand glancing against a glass coffin. Singed’s soft voice: “His quest led him astray of any trodden path.”)

“You can’t possibly know that, Viktor. This—this magic combined with the elixir I’ve been concocting…the possibilities…” Singed’s gaze is far away. He is somewhere Viktor cannot possibly reach.

Viktor tells himself Singed’s elixir is not some beta version of Shimmer. He tells himself such misfortune will not befall Zaun twice over in his presence.

But Viktor once knew Rio. He knows the cost of Singed’s ambition.

(“His own shadow dissolved to darkness.”)

“The crystals aren’t worth it,” Viktor pleads. “They will break reality as you know it.”

Singed hums. “Sometimes things must break in order to evolve.”

Viktor barks out a sharp laugh. Nothing about this is funny. “A glorious evolution.”

(“Now the only course is forward.”)

Viktor understands why they were taken. Ekko for his parallel counterpart’s invention; Viktor for either being the unfortunate fool holding the crystals or for being a walking dead man. What he doesn’t understand is what happens next. "What are your plans for us, Doctor?" he asks. 

Singed’s gaze skews briefly to Ekko. He is still sleeping soundly. Viktor is terribly envious of him. “I would, of course, let you go," Singed says. "But the boy is the only known person to have harnessed this stone's energy. And you, Viktor—your mind—well...it remains singular. I need you to help me with this—what did you call it?” Singed slips the Hexcrystal back into his pocket. There's a smile in his voice, if not on his face. “Ah, yes. Glorious evolution.”

Viktor stops pulling fruitlessly at the handcuffs. He has been frozen in Singed's calamitous wake. The doctor exits the lab, eminently self-satisfied, and the door snicks shut behind him. The chemtech lamp stutters—blinks once, twice—and dies. 

Viktor can still hear Singed's voice. 

(“The only warmth, a dream of her waltz.”)

Chapter Text

“They could be anywhere. They could be dead or dying or—”

“Hey!”

“Viktor’s not well, you know? I mean, he’s fragile. He could be—”

“Hey!”

“What?”

“Do you know what else is famously fragile?”

Jayce pauses. Eyes her. “What?”

“My fucking sanity. Chill out, will you? You’re useless like this.” Oddly, having someone beside her who is freaking the fuck out is helping Jinx not to freak the fuck out. It’s sorta like how it was with Isha. When someone needs her enough, she can adapt. She can remould herself to fill the empty space beside them. But when she’s alone…loneliness is when the monsters get in.

Right now, absent Ekko, she’s weirdly glad for Progress Man. He’s currently having a semi-breakdown. Or whatever it is that scientists turned hammer-wielding politicians have when their not-boyfriends get kidnapped. Jinx is caught between dashing his head against the nearest wall and giving him a fucking hug. If she weren’t so averse to touch, she might do just that. He seems like he might need it, the big lug.

“You’re right. You’re right,” he says absently.

Jinx preens. She is right, of course, but she could stand to be told so more. “I think we should talk to Silco,” she says abruptly.

Jayce’s head snaps toward her. He’s sat beside her, his back to Vi’s memorial, toying with a wrench he must’ve found in Powder’s belongings. “Why?” he demands.

“Silco…” His name gets lodged in Jinx’s throat for a moment. “He exists in this world—Ekko told me. Reformed, it sounds like. But I don’t buy that any version of Silco wouldn’t at least be keeping an ear out for the more fucked up happenings down here. Out of self-preservation if nothing else.” 

Jinx's Silco, like herself, had been bladed by betrayal into something cold and sharp-edged. Even in this reality where amends have been made, Vander still turned on him once. It's the sort of lesson you can't unlearn—this is something Jinx knows only too well. You can forgive, but you can't always forget. Once the paranoia has been pitted deeply enough, it's almost impossible to root out. Jinx can't imagine any version of her pseudo-father who doesn't know what's happening in every dark nook and cranny of the Lanes.

“Yes, he did strike me as quite the cockroach,” Jayce mutters.

Perhaps Jinx should be offended by this. Progress Man surely means it as an insult. But she finds that she agrees with his assessment. Silco was a cockroach. He could survive anything and everything. Except for her, of course. Proof that not even the hardiest roach can survive Cataclysm Jinx. 

Jayce hums. His head is bent forward, his fingers at his temple. “You could always pretend to be the you that already exists here. Powder, wasn’t it?”

The name shudders through her. Her response to it is automatic at this point: biting and caustic. “You could always pretend to be straight, but I doubt either of us wants to pretend to be things we’re not.”

Jayce shifts uncomfortably. Jinx can see the colour rising in his cheeks. “Why do you always do that?” he asks.

“Do what?”

Jayce rubs at the back of his neck, as if abashed. “Make comments about—about that. And Viktor and I.”

“‘Cause it makes you squirm, silly.”

Jayce just looks at her.

“Janna, you’re too easy, Progress Man.” Jinx rolls her eyes. “It’s just a joke, toots. And if it’s not a joke to you, then maybe you need to self-reflect. Or, I dunno, remove the gigantic stick from up your ass.”

“Do you self-reflect?” Jayce asks sceptically.

“…Sometimes,” Jinx says. Do hallucinations count?

“And—hey! There’s no stick up my ass.”

Jinx shoots him a grin. “D’ya want there to be? I’m sure Tin Man’s up to the job.”

“I am not having this conversation with you.”

“Why not?”

“You’re a terrorist!” But it’s said with less venom than earlier.

“I’m reformed. Retired. Whatever.”

“Since when?”

Jinx glances down at her wrist, pretends to read a watch she’s not wearing. “‘Bout three hours ago.”

Jayce sighs, as though she’s being particularly taxing. “So,” he says. “Silco?”

“Silco,” Jinx agrees. “There’s no harm in asking, and he’s the only one who might know something.”

“The harm is the fact you’re identical to another girl who already exists here, who he knows.”

“He won’t betray me.” The words are certain. Fervent.

Jayce glances at her curiously.

“There was a time when…when I didn’t trust that he wouldn’t betray me. My doubt cost him his life.” She looks Jayce dead in the eye. “I won’t doubt him again.”

Jayce is watching her back, troubled. This must be difficult for him. No one in their Piltover trusted Silco—certainly not Progress Man, with whom Silco made a promise he never intended to keep. But this wasn’t really about how much trust Jayce was willing to put into this alternate-Silco. It was about how much trust he was willing to put in her, the terrorist he had always abhorred.

“The question, Jayce Talis”— Jinx pokes him in his ludicrously large shoulder—“is how much is Viktor’s life worth to you?” Is it worth putting your trust in me?

Something ripples in his eyes, like a stone scudded across still water. Then he pushes to his feet and squares his shoulders. She sees a sudden sort of cocksure certainty in him, an unbending determination, and it's so very Vi that her heart squeezes. “Let’s go,” he says.

Jinx smiles at him. “To the Last Drop we go!”

The streets of Zaun are a startling contrast to the ones Jinx is familiar with. They, like the Powder/Jinx lair, have been cleaned up. Sanitised. Made fit for human consumption. There is notably less general rowdiness, whether in the form of drunks, druggies, or dagger fights, and fewer homeless people begging for scraps.

There are no pink eyes.

Even from the outside, the buildings seem more homely: the sorts of places where one lives rather than survives. There are new businesses, too. Reputable ones that offer more than the usual escapes of booze and sex. Places Jinx knows don’t exist in her Zaun.

Even the people seem different, more liable to unsheathe a smile than a knife. It’s an atmospheric difference, bone-deep.

Jinx is horribly, horribly jealous.

Jayce stalks beside her, looking hilariously out of place. He glances around, awed. “What happened here?” he breathes.

Jinx doesn’t know. Something about Silco and Vander making amends? It couldn’t have been only Vi’s death that made the difference. One Undercity life meant nothing where Jinx was from. In Piltover, it was a tragedy; in Zaun, a statistic.

The closer they draw to The Last Drop, the antsier Jinx grows. Naturally, she’s nervous about how Silco will react to her. She is certainly no Powder. Although given her propensity for hiding explosive hexcrystals in her lair, perhaps Powder is not totally dissimilar to Jinx.

But—no. It’s not the disparity between herself and her parallel counterpart that worries her. It’s Silco. It’s a different Silco.

She remembers a body riddled with bullet wounds; a bloated corpse in the Pilt.

She remembers a man sitting across from her as she perched atop his scarred oak desk, stiff-spined and stern. Sevika will clean up today’s mess. Jinx, her knees pulled up to her chin, rendered a useless child once again in his presence. She feels herself sinking back into old bones; the hastily shed skin of Powder.

Then the memory changes, and she is watching him from above. She recalls the way he looked from her perch in the rafters: the bird’s eye view of a predator.

The truth is, Jinx can’t comprehend a Silco that won’t be waiting for her in his office with his canines bared, his cigar freshly cut, and a shimmer-shot in his hand. Perhaps she should not prefer him like that. Perhaps she should be pleased for the supposed peace he has found in this world. But all Jinx feels when she thinks of this bizarre, amorphous, sort-of-Silco is a huge, yawning emptiness in her gut, and an undeniable sense of loss.

“Here,” Jinx says quietly.

They’ve reached The Last Drop. Her saying so is redundant; the sign outside depicts its name in a soft glow. Jinx stares for a moment, recalling its incinerated remains in her world, its smouldering carcass.

Something behind her eyes burns.

“Jinx—” Jayce begins. His voice is strangely soft.

“Right-o!” she cuts him off. “I’m gonna go it alone with Silco. No need to accost him with a Piltie, eh? Wouldn't want to get his back up.”

Jayce scoffs. "I can handle Silco." 

"You're hammer-less right now, hammer boy, but Silco still has his wit." She gives him a deeply condescending look. "I know who my bet's on." 

“Wait—what if you run into any of the other people you know?”

Jinx whirls toward him. Grins. “I won’t. I have ways of avoiding detection. Slippery as an eel, me.”

Jayce hesitates for a moment before nodding. His eyes are wary.

“Oh, don’t be so broody, Progress Man. Now, you can either go in and get a drink whilst I track down Silco or take your chances alone out here.” She eyes him. “You’re very obviously not from here, but you’re big enough that I don’t think anyone will pick a fight. So no picking any of your own, you hear?”

“I wouldn’t—”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Just—don’t get shanked, all right? I don’t feel like getting in a fight with the robot.”

With that, Jinx twirls on her heel and slips into The Last Drop.

The noise hits her first: a sociable hum. Then the smell—spilt ale, stale sweat. It’s very similar to what she remembers from her childhood, before Silco’s hostile takeover. Certainly, no one is sparring or screaming or performing a strip-tease. No one would dare. After all, this is Vander’s domain. It’s odd, Jinx thinks. She has always considered Silco the epitome of control, but in many ways, Vander runs a tighter ship.

Immediately, she feels ashamed, as though finding Silco lacking in some way is betraying him.

Jinx keeps close to a cluster of people standing near the bar, her face turned to the side, and her hood pulled up. Blue hair isn’t too uncommon in Zaun, but she doesn’t want to take any risks. She chances a peek out of the corner of her eye and—

There.

Not Silco. Vander. He is behind the bar, dishrag over one shoulder, cocktail shaker over the other. He is older than he ever got to be in Jinx’s world, although the extra years don’t seem to have cost him much, aside from a few grey hairs. He is starkly handsome in that way he always was, and his hair is pulled up into a top knot, of all things.

Jinx doesn’t think she’s ever seen him so unburdened.

It panics her, this realisation. Here she is, cannonballing into his world. Cataclysm Jinx. Her mere presence will curse him, unmake him.

Jinx forces herself to take a breath as she scans the bar—no Silco. He must be in the office. Probably balancing the books. He always had a head for numbers.

She sidles through the crowd—slippery as an eel—careful to keep her head down, her steps quiet. She knows this journey like the back of her hand.

She waits until she’s certain Vander is occupied before scurrying up the stairs toward the office. Her heart is hammering so hard she can feel it in her fingertips as she reaches the door. It is cracked open a touch, and Jinx can hear the faint sounds within. A soothing scritch (pen against paper; “…the cost of Marcus’ silence, you wouldn’t believe…”). A faint clink (ice tapping against glass—a sip of bootlegged whiskey). A decisive snip (the cutting of a cigar; ash tapped into a tray that has been painted blue and pink).

Silco, she thinks. Silco.

Silence. Then: “Hello?”

Jinx realises she’s said his name aloud and claps a hand over her mouth. Her other hand reaches for the door and shoves it open. She stumbles over the threshold, clumsy as a newborn foal, then staggers to a halt at the sight of him. Silco stands from his desk and rounds it carefully, eyeing her as one would a skittish animal, although his eyes are immediately fond. 

Jinx is just staring at him, a bit nauseated. It feels to her that a stranger has stolen Silco’s face and aped his mannerisms. It feels unreal. Less real, even, than her hallucinations.

“Pow—No, not Powder.” Silco cocks his head. That gesture is familiar. Curious and vaguely predatory. His eyes are sharp, and that, too, is reminiscent of the Silco she knew. That boldly assessing gaze, that bright spark of intelligence. “Someone else?”

Jinx tries to say her name, but her voice somehow evades her. All she can do is look at him. He is dressed a little differently, but his clothes are still fresh-pressed, his hair slicked back. Silco had always loved these little concessions to a finer life. Made him feel proper, Jinx supposes. Made him feel worth something. She sees that these habits have followed him even into this kinder life.

His face is bizarre—in some ways more aged, in some ways less. He appears to have fewer lines carved into his cheeks and brow, although more around his eyes and mouth, as though he laughs more but stresses less. His eye looks prosthetic, mechanical rather than chemical. Well-made. Perhaps Powder made it, Jinx thinks bitterly. Perhaps she patiently led him through the installation process in this very office whilst simultaneously, an entire world away, Jinx stabbed a needle into her Silco’s eye and filled him with poison.

“Child?” he says, concerned now. She still hasn’t spoken. His eyes have softened. Fear haunts us all, child. And suddenly it doesn’t matter that this Silco isn’t her Silco. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know her—at least, not this her. This isn’t her Silco, but it’s a Silco, and Jinx finds herself careening forward, her head nuzzling into his chest, her arms looping around his waist.

She feels Silco freeze. Senses the moment he realises he isn’t being attacked. Then his arms are cautiously hugging her back. His hug is more relaxed than her Silco’s ever was; this is a man for whom touch no longer automatically means pain.

“You smell the same,” she says, her voice muffled by the cloth of his shirt. He must smoke the same cigars: dark molasses, the scent of cloves.

Silco pulls back to stare intently at her face. “Who are you, child?” he asks.

Jinx steps away, toying with a blue lock of hair that’s hanging in front of her face. She tugs on it hard—tugs herself back into reality. She avoids his eyes as she says, “Jinx.”

A pause. “Jinx,” Silco says slowly. “You look remarkably like Powder.”

Jinx flinches.

“A short while ago, our Ekko lost a few days—total blank space. Poor boy doesn’t remember a thing. But the strange part was, during this time, Ekko was walking and talking and doing all of the things he generally does. Powder, our resident genius, had already figured it all out, of course. Parallel timelines. A parallel Ekko.” Silco smiles, and it’s his shark’s smile, sharp-toothed and knowing. “Would you happen to know anything about this, Jinx?”

“Weeellllll…” Jinx chuckles. The sound is forced. Jagged.

“Are you from his world?”

Ah, Silco. Clever, clever Silco. He always cut to the quick of it. “Other Ekko’s? Yes. He’s gone, though. I mean—he was taken. My Ekko, I mean. We think maybe because of the invention he made? The one that sent him back.”

The words would be unintelligible to anyone else, but Silco seems adept at Jinx-handling, even in this world. “Powder mentioned an invention,” he says. “It was the building of it that clued her in. She said it went with him.”

“It did. But—something happened. It blew up. Went kaboom, you know? And now we’re here and he’s—he’s gone. Someone took him.”

“And you came to me.” He’s eyeing her again. Intense. Curious. “Why?”

Because I thought you might know something. Because you were a crime lord in my world, and I wonder if any of those proclivities are consistent in this one. “Because I trust you.” The words escape her, unbidden. They are devastatingly earnest. She means it. She absolutely means it.

Something in him visibly softens. She supposes he is seeing Powder right now, anxious and scared and adrift. It feels wrong. It feels like she’s tricking him, somehow. Like she’s manipulating him using a face he loves. If only he’d reach out. If only he’d peel back the skin of Powder and expose the slow rot happening within. He’d refuse her then, surely. He’d run for the fucking hills.

“You work here, in the bar, right?” Jinx says desperately. “You must hear things. People who might be interested in an invention like Ekko's.”

“There is a man,” Silco says. “I knew him once. Long ago. His name is still whispered about occasionally. He does well to stay hidden. Ignored. But what I do hear is invariably concerning. Mutations. Poisons. Chemical aberrations. He’s a disgraced scientist. If someone in Zaun was interested in your Ekko’s technology, it would be him.”

“Scientist…” Jinx echoes.

“His name is Corin Reveck. Doctor Corin Reveck, I suppose.”

Jinx is stewing on this. The name doesn’t ring a bell, but something else does. Mutations. Chemical aberrations. She recalls being strapped to a cold metal table, a Shimmer-filled syringe being plunged into her veins. The unending pain of it.

The realisation hits her with the graceless weight of a sucker-punch.

Singed. 

Chapter Text

As though Jinx’s words are an omen, Jayce finds trouble within two minutes of her departure. Or, rather, trouble finds him.

He makes for tantalising prey, he imagines. His imposing size aside, Jayce is quite obviously out of his element. His time in the alternate reality sharpened him, bladed some of those smoother edges, but Jayce knows the meek softness of his own heart. Ambessa Medarda had taken great joy in clawing it from his chest and showing it to him, letting him see its multitude of imperfections, its utter lack of guile or guardedness.

Her carnivorous smile: even though she lost, it lingers with him. He’s not sure why. Perhaps it’s because she’s the first person to be herself unapologetically, to show him, unflinching, the full scope of her awfulness. She lied a lot, Ambessa, but there was a strange honesty to her at times. She was the Piltover council without all its glitter and gold: warmongering, legacy-obsessed, and covetous. 

She wore no false faces. She didn’t have to. Strength was enough.

Mel was her stark opposite. She wore so many faces that Jayce was never sure which was her true one, if any. Jayce has never had the patience, nor the knack, for duplicity. Several years on the council haven’t changed that. It's made him easy pickings, he supposes.

So, when the vultures of the Undercity start to circle, he is entirely unsurprised. He knows they see the humiliating truth of him.

Three men come at him with dulled blades, and Jayce finds himself reaching for a weapon that isn’t there.

You’re hammer-less, hammer boy.

He hates that Jinx was right.

“That’s enough, bozos, don’t you reckon?” a voice cuts through the haze.

The men go still at the voice. Jayce glances up and meets eyes the colour of the waters of the Howling Abyss, a pure, crystalline blue. The voice is vaguely familiar, but more so is the face: soft-featured, pretty, young. Jinx, Jayce realises. But also…not. This universe’s version of her, he supposes. She looks younger than the Jinx he knows, clad in grease-splattered overalls with her starkly blue hair in two buns atop either side of her head. She’s slightly bigger than the Jinx he’s familiar with, but somehow feels smaller, as though her presence demands a little less space.

She’s eyeing him, a calculating gleam in her gaze. That is familiar. Less edged with insanity, perhaps, but he sees the Jinx in her immediately.

“Why don’t you gentlemen fuck off, then? Leave the Piltie to Vander and me.”

The threat of Vander, whoever he is, seems to be enough. Jayce’s assailants tear off with nary a protest, only dark looks tossed his way. Alternate-Jinx seems entirely unfazed; her gaze hasn’t shifted from Jayce.

It strikes him that she hasn’t even pulled a weapon.

“With me, Piltie,” she says, leading him towards The Last Drop.

She has Jinx’s swagger, if not her aura of neuroticism. There is a sharply intelligent air about her that Jayce figures is consistent between worlds. There is an expectation, too, that he will follow. At any rate, he knows better than to refuse her summons.

Alternate-Jinx leads him through the front doors of The Last Drop with the ease of someone who belongs. She doesn’t even check to see if he’s following; she knows he will. It’s disconcerting, her certainty. Almost more so than Jinx’s instability.

Jayce glances around The Last Drop’s interior with curious eyes. The place is careworn, of course, but there’s a surprising warmth to it: the feel of a place well-loved and lived in. It’s bustling, but not rowdy. It takes all of Jayce’s preconceived notions about Undercity bars as dens of sordid iniquity and flips them upside down.

There’s a man behind the bar pulling pints. He glances up as alternate-Jinx approaches, his eyes soft. “Powder,” he says. “Who’s your friend?” His voice is warm. Welcoming. He has the build of someone who could concuss you with an overzealous hug, but his disposition is incongruously gentle.

“Dunno. Found him outside lookin’ all lost puppy-like. Some knuckleheads had drawn knives on him. Far as I could see, it was unprovoked.” Jinx—Powder—hops up onto a barstool and glances between the two men, legs swinging. Jayce has this brief, awful moment, looking at this version of Jinx, where he realises she’s just a fucking kid.

What did we do? he thinks. What have we been doing to them?

The man’s gaze finds him. He is curiously unreadable. “You lost?”

Jayce considers this. “A little,” he admits quietly. 

The barman is still staring. He seems to be taking Jayce’s measure. At length, he says, “Well, we’ve a knack for strays here, friend.”

“I’m from Piltover,” Jayce blurts stupidly. But Vander’s being so nice, and surely he wouldn’t be so welcoming if he knew just who he was offering his kindness to and—

“Pfft, yeah, big man, we know,” cuts in Powder with an eye roll.

Jayce wrangles the immediate urge to bite back. She’s just so—so Jinx.

“That obvious?” he asks wryly.

She snorts. “Yup.”

“How so?”

“It’s in the way you walk. The way you talk. The way you look at us.”

“How’s that?”

Powder’s gaze is deeply unnerving. She’s picking him apart with her eyes alone. “Like you can’t stand the stench of us.”

Jayce flinches. His immediate reaction is indignation. It’s not true. It’s not. He’s known Vi and Viktor for years. He knows the Undercity people aren’t any different from himself. He knows they’re not animals. And yet…Viktor isn’t a good standard to judge against. He spent years upon years refining himself in Piltover, shapeshifting into the correct mould, intentionally making himself palatable for Piltovan consumption. And Vi…Vi was Caitlyn’s…something. Fierce. Funny. Rough around the edges. One of the good ones, a voice in his head says, and he hates himself for it, because Powder’s right. She’s right.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly.

The barman slides a drink across the bar in his direction.

“I don’t have—” Jayce begins.

“On the house.” The man smiles. “Name’s Vander.”

“Jay,” Jayce says after a moment. It feels wrong to use his proper name here. There may be another Jayce here—this reality's Jayce—and taking his name and strutting about with his face feels dishonest.

“So, what are you?” Powder asks with Jinx’s distinct lack of tact. “Scorned socialite?”  

“Scientist,” Jayce replies, unthinking. It’s true in his world, but possibly not here.

“Oh, a Piltie scientist. How droll.” Powder’s demeanour has changed in an instant. Her words, previously teasing, are suddenly scathing.

Jayce freezes, stunned by the shift. Powder hops from the stall and begins to slink away. “I’m gonna find Ekko,” she tosses over her shoulder. Her eyes fix on Vander. “Have fun with the dweeb.”

Vander is frowning. “Powder—”

But she’s already gone, a glimmer of bright blue hair melting into the crowd.

Silence. Then—

“I’m so sorry,” Jayce says, staring awkwardly down into his drink. It feels like all he does here is apologise for being a fucking idiot. “I didn’t mean to upset her.”

Vander waves him off. “Not your fault. Powder—she doesn’t like to talk about it much. Her sister, Vi—she died. A long time ago now, although it doesn’t always feel like it. It was an explosion, Topside, in some scientist’s apartment. It’s nothing against you personally. You just…reminded her.”

Vander might carry on talking. It’s impossible for Jayce to know either way. His mind has stuttered to an abrupt, lurching halt. He knows the apartment where Vi died. He knows what explosion killed her.

He knows that he is once again at fault for a child’s death. And not just any child. A friend. An annoying, sort of awful friend, but a friend, nonetheless. A friend who, in another reality, wielded a weapon powered by the same tech that killed her.

Jayce tries to wrangle it back—he really does—but the urge is insistent, unavoidable. He doubles over and heaves, expelling a string of yellow bile onto the floor.

In all realities, Jayce is a killer. And in all realities, Hextech is the problem, not the solution.

And for the first time, he understands the urge that had Jinx picking up that rocket launcher.

Morals.

Viktor finds himself thinking of them in the oppressive dark of Singed’s lab. He’d had them once. Irrevocable. Unbending. They had led him astray from Jayce, fleeing in cowardice from his Hextech afterbirth (cold down to the marrow; not even the blanket Jayce gently swaddled him in could protect him from his own inner chill). They had swayed him from Singed on more than one occasion. First, as a child, when faced with the grim reality of Rio’s fate. Then again, in the commune, his mind already half-warped by Hextech.

I will not sacrifice his humanity for your cause.

He’d been speaking of Vander, of course. Vander, with his varicoloured dreams and his wildfire mind. Vander, with his two daughters and his two sons and the pain pain pain.

Viktor, stalwart in his assertions. Intractable in his principles. I will not sacrifice his humanity for your cause, he had said. And then he had sacrificed his own.

His descent, in the end, had been seamless. How easy it was to fall. How simple to let it all go in favour of a glorious destiny. He’d slid out of his own painstakingly maintained control.

Viktor watches Singed putter about the lab through slitted eyes. He is pretending to doze, hoping against all hope that Singed doesn’t notice the farce and try to engage him in yet another conversation about dead Viktors and girls in glass coffins and glorious evolutions.

He looks at Singed now, and he sees what he has always seen, in every reality, in every variation: that ceaseless ambition, that ardent dedication to craft.

And Viktor realises that he does not like looking at Singed because he fears seeing himself reflected back.