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Always with you, sis.
Vi knew what those words meant as she looked in the mournful face of her sister dangling beneath her, the beast that had once been their father clinging to the menace turned hero of Zaun with its claws, refusing to let go. Vi knew what Jinx was about to do. What Vi had not been able to do.
No. Not this time. She would not fail her sister one last time. There was no time for hesitation. As much as it hurt her, she had to make a choice to try to save Jinx at the cost of any chance of Vander coming back – because if Vi did nothing, she would lose both. Before Jinx could do whatever she was planning, Vi used the hand she’d been using to hold on to the ledge and her legs to launch herself towards the metallic beast with as much force as she could manage, letting all of them start to fall down towards the hexgate’s core somewhere deep below.
Time seemed to slow down as Vi let go of Jinx’s hand as she was rapidly descending past her sister, the shock and some emotion Vi could not recognize on her sister’s face. Vi raised both of her fists above her head and started screaming. Scenes began to flash through her mind as she descended towards the beast, as she prepared to hit with all her might. She wished, that just once, she could solve a problem by punching. Just let it work once, that’s all she asked. Her gauntlet rattled and hissed as it was pushed to its limits, and even above.
Just once. Please. Just this one time.
Vander appearing from the red smoke. Their parents dead on the bridge. Silco nowhere to be seen.
Mylo and Claggor, bent and broken.
Vander, twisted by Shimmer, dead.
Powder crying on the floor after her sister had just hit her. After Vi had hit her.
Silco hugging Powder who had no one else to turn to in the midst of flames.
Not quite Jinx, not quite Powder lighting a blue torch in Zaun as Caitlyn and Vi raced towards her.
The bridge, exploding again, the same not Powder walking in from the smoke.
The tea party. The choice Vi didn’t make. The impossible choice. And the devastating consequences.
Except, it wasn’t an impossible choice. Vi saw it now what she didn’t see then. Jinx had not really expected her to kill Caitlyn to get Powder back. Jinx had hoped, hoped so desperately, that Vi would have just accepted Jinx as she was. If Vi had killed Caitlyn to get Powder back, it wouldn’t have worked. Jinx was not Powder anymore, and Vi would not have been Vi if she’d done as Jinx asked as payment for Powder’s return. Instead, Vi’s hesitation to just accept Jinx in that moment had forced Jinx to make a choice, a painful choice.
After all, when Silco pointed the gun at Vi, there was zero hesitation. Jinx did the choice Vi could not make, and suffered in Vi’s stead, losing her father again. And in that moment, in that one moment, Silco chose his last moments to let who he had once been shine through. Silco of all people reassured Jinx as it all came crashing down. A glimpse of what could have been only making the nightmare worse.
The cruelest of jokes the universe had thrown at them.
The beast was closer and closer. It seemed to fill Vi’s entire world. A metallic monstrosity, a cage inside of which there might have been what remained of her father. Tears streamed down Vi’s face as she descended like a meteorite, her lungs in pain from the sheer amount of screaming she was doing.
The fight in the temple. Jinx welcoming death. That girl, Isha, saving them all from themselves.
Isha playing with Jinx. Jinx making sure Isha was okay after Vi hit her accidentally. Jinx the big sister.
Isha saving them all from Vander. From themselves. Sacrificing herself so Jinx could live.
Something clicked in Vi’s head. She realized what Jinx had planned to do.
Jinx coming in to save them all with Ekko.
Vi’s fists descended with force towards the beast’s face. She heard another voice screaming. Jinx. She saw a pink glare somewhere to the left of her, but she could not turn. Not now. She had to look at Vander as she hit. As she…
As she would kill him.
You still have a good heart, kid.
She did not know if she had hallucinated Vander’s voice, but it did not really matter. The beast’s claws were coming for her now – claws that had no Jinx in them. Vi could not focus on such matters as the fists struck true with greater force than any punch she had ever thrown, transferring all that momentum, all that violence into the face that had once belonged to Vander. She just had to trust Jinx. Trust her sister.
She heard metal bend and break. She heard the hextech crackle. She felt her muscles strain. She lost feeling in the fist that wasn’t protected by a gauntlet. She felt the gauntlet begin to break from the sheer enormity of the forces involved. She felt the pain and weight of everything since that day when everything had burnt down course through her arms and straight into her fists. She screamed it all out. All the pain, all the misery, all the suffering, all the rage and sorrow. She struck with it all, praying it would be enough.
Just this once.
_____________
Jinx saw her sister lunge as she let go of Jinx’s pale hand.
They all begun to free fall – but Jinx knew Vi had not let her go to fall to her death.
Vi trusted her to save herself in that moment.
Jinx begun to scream out of an emotion she could not describe as she kicked herself out of the beast’s grasp, just as she’d planned. Just too soon. Without having set the bomb, without doing her plan.
For a moment she thinks that Vander had actually let go of her a moment before she kicked off, but she can’t think about that. Not now. Not ever, perhaps.
Her eyes flared pink as her Shimmer enhanced body was working overtime. Her mind raced. Every detail, every angle, she had to do it correctly. No second chances here. Just one last chance.
She launched herself towards the wall by kicking herself out of the beast’s grasp like a stroke of pink lightning, momentarily stopping there as she clung to some pipes, railings and whatever else she could grab onto so she could brace herself for the most important jump of her life. Vi could not save herself there. Jinx would have to do it.
Please let it work. No jinxes this time. No mistakes. Please. Just once.
There was Vi, running in to save her from Silco when she didn’t need saving, and messing it up. Several times.
There was Vi, running in to kill her for what she did to Piltover, and messing it up.
There was Vi, saving Isha from Vander and calming down wolfie Vander, and not messing it up.
There was Vi, running in to stop her from dying with Isha, and not messing it up.
There was Vi, jumping in to save the Jinx from the ghost of their father.
There had been a plan for Jinx to ’die’ here. To make it seem like she was gone, even if Jinx had wanted to try to live regardless. She knew Vi had no such plan for herself. She was just running in fists first and trusting those near her to do the right thing, to pull her out of the hole she was jumping down into if it was too deep.
Trusting Jinx to do the right thing. To pull her out again, like she’d done with Isha when they searched for Vander.
Jinx screamed harder than she’d screamed ever before as she launched herself towards Vi while Shimmer lit her eyes alight, just moments before Vi’s fists struck the metallic beast in the face. Before the world was filled with blue for one moment, almost blinding both young women, before that awful, awful CRACK as metal broke and bent. As their father begun to die for one last time.
The beast begun to crash downwards ever harder, deep, deep into the depths and the core of the hexgates glowing blue below, the beast’s broken and mangled face letting out an unearthly howl as all of Vi’s strength and momentum, the gauntlet’s power and the weight of all they’d been through hit the beast, transferring all that energy to the beast.
Jinx crashed into her sister, both sisters starting to get flinged towards the other side of the space, towards the ventilation shaft Jinx had noticed earlier.
Time seemed to slow down ever slower.
The hextech gem popped out of Vi’s heavily damaged gauntlet, the gem itself cracked and damaged as well somehow. Almost like the ones from all those years before. Imperfect. Raw. Unstable. Powerful. Explosive.
Jinx had grabbed onto Vi with her one hand, letting go of the payload-less bomb in that hand, while she grabbed the unstable gem from midair. Jinx felt Vi’s arm wrap around her as well.
Vi let her gauntlet fall and grabbed the open bomb, starting to take it towards Jinx with her free hand. Without a word exchanged between them, Vi holds the bomb towards Jinx’s hand holding the cracked gem. Jinx’s painted nails push the gem in and close the bomb. Both hold the bomb, hand full of pale painted fingers and the rough fist of a fighter both clutching the same thing in unison, fingers interlocked with each other around the bomb. They raise their hands – and they fling the bomb downwards just before they crash into the ventilation shaft. Towards the beast. Towards Vander.
Towards their father.
”Always with you, sis”, Vi said, her voice hoarse. And time starts moving again quickly.
In another time, another place, Vander tucked the two children into bed. He patted their heads and sat there for a moment, making sure they were safe. Then, he blew the candle out. It was time for him to go.
Then the chasm lights up in red and blue.
A hammer crumbles on top of the tower as the long nightmare ends at last.
__________________
The sound came from below. The explosion was like the dying roar of some otherworldly beast. In a way, perhaps it was.
The ground trembled for a moment while Caitlyn desperately searched for a scope of some kind, to look up at the hexgate-tower. She saw it shake. Saw it crack. And then, silence. That dreadful silence. Jinx’s obnoxious music had been silenced a while ago and Caitlyn hated to admit she missed it now – at least it would’ve been a sign of life. The sounds of fighting had stalled out. The quiet hum of hexgates that had been ever present for years now was just gone.
She didn’t know where she got the scope from, who gave it to her. She almost put it in front of the eye that was not there anymore. It ached like everything else, but the dread in her heart was more painful than anything else at that moment. Then she heard the shout.
”There!”
A crack in the wall that crumbled into an opening as concrete and steel fell away. Red and blue smoke billowed out. Caitlyn did not know if she could dare to hope. Mel and the enforcers looked at her with worry. They did not know if there was any hope either, for anyone who’d been inside that tower. The Noxian honor guard stood still near Ambessa’s body, no longer caring about the battle. Ambessa Medarda no longer commanded them.
And then, two figures shambled out of the smoke, collapsing to a sitting position on the edge of the opening in the tower walls. Caitlyn had a hard time separating the two from each other, but she knew. She knew they’d made it. That Vi would be okay.
That was enough.
Caitlyn allowed herself to pass out from the stress and the pain with a smile on her face.
_____________
They were both covered in dirt, in ash and in Jinx’s paint from the colored smoke. From a distance, it was hard to separate one from the other. Their colors were muted, mixed and diluted from everything staining them. Only the color of their hair was different, and even there their colors seemed to bleed into each other. They looked wordlessly down at the city, both holding onto each other so they wouldn’t fall in their exhaustion. It all looked so small from up there. All the smoke here and there, whether it was dusty grey, colourful or even pitch black, there were splotches here and there. Most of the Noxian ships were retreating to the horizon, just one or two left in the harbor. Piltover used to shine in its gold and white, but its colors had been changed by all the destruction. Maybe forever.
One day this city will respect us.
And it wasn’t just Piltover the sisters saw, there was Zaun too. It was dark, it was grimy, but it had its colors too. Mostly green, but they knew its purples, its Shimmer, the blue Jinx gave it, its neon lights and everything else barely even visible from up there. Ugly, violent and dangerous, but still, their old home once. Maybe no longer. Not for either of them.
”I didn’t think… I didn’t think you’d be able to do it”, Jinx said, her voice drained and hoarse. There were no jokes, no sarcasm, just a tired girl. Just the person she’d always been beneath it all.
”To let go of him. I thought… I had to go with him. That you’d never let go. Of him. Or…”
Jinx did not finish her sentence, but she didn’t really need to. Vi had figured it out. That’s why she had lunged towards the beast that had once been their father. Their shared past that was dragging all of them down. The last chance to reach out, to save and to be saved.
”You want to leave”, Vi said, her voice just as drained as her sister’s. It was not a question. There was no need for such. Not between sisters.
”I have to.”
”Okay.”
Silence.
On a bridge covered in blue smoke, Vi and Jinx stand next to two children looking up to them, a small child with pink hair and another with blue hair. The sisters’ emotions are a mess, but they point the children towards the smoke. There are people standing there. Familiar people. Jinx looks at Isha standing there amongst the smoke, and lets out a little sob as she does a little ’poow’.
”Can you… can you stay a day or two? Before you go?”
”...I’ll stay three. But no more.”
”Okay. Thanks.”
The birds were returning, the ones so disturbed by all the chaos and mayhem were starting to fly over Piltover again, return to their nests.
”It’s really over. He's gone. They’re really gone. All of them. It’s just us”, Jinx said, voice and lip quivering.
Vi said nothing, she just nodded. If she said anything at that moment, she was going to cry and she didn’t know when she would stop. She knew exactly what Jinx meant.
”W-we can let them go”, Jinx’s voice was cracking, sobs bubbling out from underneath the surface.
”Neither of us messed up. W-we’re just… Just two sisters sitting on a ledge”, Vi said, and the dam broke. That simple acknowledgement was not much, but now, they both knew it to be true. It wasn’t a lie anymore, never again. And that was all they needed to let themselves mourn, to throw themselves to each others arms.
The young Violet and Powder walked away from their adult selves, into the blue smoke. Vander was there to give them a big hug. Silco appeared to brush Powder’s hair, not as he had been, but as he should have been, as the glimpse of what could have been. Mylo, Claggor, Benzo and others from the Lanes, other faces and lives the sisters barely remembered. Too many.
And then, Felicia and Connol. Mom and dad. They took their little children up into their arms, before gazing lovingly at the adult sisters beyond the smoke. They nodded. The sisters could go, at long last.
It wasn’t pretty when the sisters cried. They were ugly, heaving sobs as they held on to each other. For so many years, they’d been filled with an avalanche of emotions, leaving no room for them to actually mourn all that they had lost. Guilt, duty, anger and who knows what else had shaped both for so long, shaped them so thoroughly neither sister could have been anything more than their pasts. Filled to the brim with everything they had gone through, it began to drain out at last. Every death, every bit of violence and madness, every sin, both real and imagined. It was all there.
In their tears they mourned what had been as well as what could have been. A world that wasn’t, families lost, the people they had been before the flames. Which one was the monster and which one was the hero wasn’t something that mattered anymore, if it ever truly had. If there’d even ever been a hero or a monster instead of just two people who had been hurt so badly, so deeply, that they kept hurting each other and the world around them until either they or the world started to break. Until both reached out their hand to save the other.
Don’t cry. You’re perfect.
Jinx wailed, face contorted into an ever uglier shape as the tears just didn’t stop flowing. She buried her head to her sister’s chest, hugging her so tightly while touching her all over as if to make sure she was real. There were no voices. Nothing disappeared. It was all real. Her sister was there, and accepted her as she was right now, not as what she had been once or could have been. The daughter of three fathers could share her sorrow with her sister at last.
You have a good heart.
Vi had kept on to her hard edge for so long, hidden even her sorrow underneath a veil of rage and determination, but now it was gone. Just like her sister, she used her arms to hold Jinx so tightly it almost hurt Jinx. Not that she minded at that point. It was done. After all that time, all the misery, all the hate, Vi could just hold her sister for a moment. Powder had been gone for a long time, but it had taken Vi so long to see what had been right in front of her eyes. Her sister was her sister, no matter what she’d become. Only after Vi had been at her lowest had she begun to see the truth. To be able to trust her sister again. To understand that Jinx had grown beyond just her little sister that needed to be protected or a monster others had to be protected from. Before anything else, she was just her sister, warts and all.
Finally, they could start building something new. Vi with Caitlyn. Jinx with the people she'd meet on her journeys. And one day, they’d share their tales with each other.
In the blue smoke, Jinx and Vi watch as the people from their past vanish into the smoke. They turn around, walking towards something else. Something new.
____________________________________
Zaun and Piltover began to heal. So much was lost, but out of that loss, new things were born, even as losses were mourned. Many sins were forgiven in the aftermath, even ones thought unforgivable.
The council was rebuilt. The woman who had fought for Zaun for so long was finally acknowledged, the woman who had followed both Vander and Silco. Sevika. It was just the first step, but others would follow, even if the road ahead was long and difficult.
In the shadows, a crow with six red eyes skulked, hunting for any remnants of hextech it could find, before flying off with the Noxians. Who knows whether it found what it was looking for.
A metallic woman examined herself in the mirror, her father behind her, joyful at long last. But for how long?
Mel Medarda headed to Noxus, to a confrontation with a dangerous enemy. Time would tell her fate. Dead like her mother and brother, victorious at a heavy cost, or transformed forever into something she wouldn’t recognize?
Ekko sat on that rooftop alone. He knew Jinx could never be the same as the Powder he’d met, but he knew that the same heart beat in Jinx’s chest as it had in Powder’s chest. Perhaps he and Jinx could be something more than old friends later. Perhaps not. Ekko had to let Jinx go and see what the future held. He could not let himself chain her to the past. He had saved her, and that had to be enough.
In the Kiramman mansion, Vi and Caitlyn sat by at a fireplace. Vi was gently holding a colorful little toy monkey. One with no explosive payload in it. She had not even needed to check to know it. It was just a goodbye gift.
”We made it, cupcake”, Vi says as Caitlyn sits next to her, both leaning on each other.
”But, I suppose this is just the beginning, Violet”, Caitlyn retorts and is rewarded with a smile for her efforts.
”A new beginning”, Vi nods, looking out towards the window. The view is beautiful, and she sees the airship. It had been three days. Caitlyn follows her gaze, but then pulls Vi’s head a little so that their eyes meet, what’s left of them anyway. The message is clear. Vi is more than happy to accept the invitation. She can let go now.
And besides, there was Jinx’s final message, held by the little toy monkey.
Always with you, sis. Even when we’re worlds apart.
We’ll see each other again. I promise.
- JINX
__________________
The airship flies towards the open ocean, away from the twin cities and towards something new. If anyone were around except the ship’s lone occupant, they could hear her humming softly.
’Dear friend across the river...’