#also: jinx

[revelisms]

Excerpt: A Gift for Birdie

Vi reminisces on the past, and reckons with the present. She and Silco chat about a gunsmith.

From a work in progress set after 'heron blue,' an AU where Vi and Jinx reconnect under different terms. Slow, rocky relationship rebuilding, found family messiness, and a dash of hurt/comfort.

Music is humming on the jukebox, again.

It's not the kind Vander would play—not his soul-songs and morning light and blanketing warmth—but similar.

Jazzier rifts on the edges. Low, muted, musing. A glowing moon, to a burning sun.

It's like autumn nights and weaving branches; like the shadow that toils behind the bar—too thin, too sharp, too spider-like to be the silhouette instinct urges her to see, that her heart bleeds and aches for; a man wrapped in red and black, instead of beige and blue.

It's Sunday. The afternoons are always slow enough to count the damned minutes by hand.

She's picked up on his habit for making his rounds of other business ventures, on days like these—Sunday Stockies, as Jinx calls them—ventures, Vi was realizing, that were more than just meetings and trade edicts and knife-edged threats; more than just his cigars and signatures and shark-still eyes, sorting through contracts three miles thick.

She finds him down here, far more often than she would have ever dared. An image that doesn't match, that isn't right—but one that fills an empty, gaping space in her mind's eye, nonetheless.

The familiarity eats at her. Strange, in its stranger comforts.

It doesn't make it any easier, invading his breathing space.

A scrape of glass and metal sounds off behind the bar. With it, a dry drawl: "Still asleep, is she?" 

The girl snoring behind her paint-smattered door is seventeen today: beached on a bed of bomb-scraps and blueprints, in a room littered with clothes Vi doesn't recognize, the air tanged with gunpowder and metal.

Vi knows it, because she had sat with her in it the night before, well past the twelfth bell. Listened to her ramblings about the latest missions and some brute who'd gotten his face smashed in, the tale spiked with a manic wonder.

He deserved it, Jinx had crooned, shaking out her wrist with a theatric twirl. Those bones, though! Yeesh! Felt like they were made'a rocks.

Her sister never did well around violence, before. Now, from all Vi had gathered, she burst to life at the first sign of it, like a fuse waiting to be lit.

That wasn't the same. Wasn't right. Wasn't Powder. 

And while Vi had listened to it all—a knot lacing through her stomach, piercing straight to her throat—she'd felt a chill at her shoulder. Ignored it, at first—like she'd ignored the tack of his heels over the stairs; ignored the slow, prowling sweep of his gait down the hall.

But the chill had lingered. Turned heavy as the nose of a gun pressed to her nape. She'd sliced her eyes over her shoulder, and found a shadow looming at her sister's cracked door: a glowing eye simmering through it.

He'd leered at her from the shadows, in deathly silence. She'd stared back. Tried and failed to keep a snarl off her mouth.

It was as though Jinx knew he was there, without even having to look. She'd bantered him off, with rolling eyes and teenageish grumblings (It's late, I know!). Not long after, she'd started up her yawnings, and shooed Vi out.

And that—that wasn't the same, at all. 

Powder had always hated sleeping alone. As long as Vi could remember, she'd beg and beg her to stay until she drifted off, to the point that their designated beds had blurred to one.

She'd never felt safe enough in her own skin; never felt at home, even in the spaces that were wholly theirs.

The nights had never been kind to her, in that way. To any of them.

And that bastard had come to her door, like he knew all of it, as much as Vi did; like he, too, had found odd routines in Jinx's sing-songed Night-nights!, waiting for the times he'd find her tear-streaked and shaking instead, hands itching at her comforters.

He'd stood there and stared—like he'd forgotten Vi was there at all, back where she belonged: sitting knee-to-knee with her sister and knifing a glare through the door, denying to her last breath that he would have ever set foot in here, wrapped up Jinx's knobby hand beneath his blood-stained owned and sat shoulder-to-shoulder with her, prattling off quiet folktales and business nothings while the green light of their city fluttered and dimmed.

She stands across from him in a too-empty bar, music not-quite-Vander's toiling behind her, glaring at the chalk that smudges his slacks, and bites down the venom building on her tongue. Mutters, "I want to get something for Birdie," instead.

For Jinx, she means.

She still can't manage the poison of that name, whether chosen by her sister or not. It cuts her too deeply to bear.

He's turned to the shelf above him: another scrape of glass. "Have you not coin of your own?" The words scathe as dryly as the flit of his lashes. His hand sweeps from the shelf, sorts through another.

Vi drags her fist to a knot. "It's at the Bridgewaltz," she huffs, curtly. "Sevika said you had a...connection."

Fronts upon fronts for business deals behind closed doors, built on partnerships forged decades past.

It uproots her—rattles her, still—peering into the inner workings of what all the Lanes used to be. What all Vander had never told her.

Silco counts bottles by the dozen, a full cycle of breath, before turning down to the supply sheets clipboarded over the bar. Undercity light prisms through the glass, a greenish-gold haze: white-glowed on the page he flicks back between his fingers, on the silvering sweeps of fringe that fall loose at his temple.

He looks out of place, down here. Uncharacteristically dressed down. That rotted splotch bared on his face, his hair not quite tamed, the red-black lines of his sleeves cuffed and rolled. 

Another page rasps between his fingers. "Demian," he rumbles then, penning in a string of numbers in his spindly script. A long-faded scar hooks down the inside of his left wrist. His eyes raise to hers, slowly. She rips her own away. "He operates the gunshop by the third quadrant."

Vi chews hard on the inside of her cheek. "Narrows it down, huh?"

A dark brow crooks at her. "We've a code," Silco gravels on, without a trace of humor. "He'll ask what you're having; you'll say rumwine." Another rustle of paper, another scratch of his pen. "How much do you need?"

She shrugs, ticking her nail at her palm. "Was something like one-eighty, last I saw."

He says nothing to that, for a moment. Flips through another supply sheet. And she stares at the way his brow furrows, at the twist of his wrist; at how he stands just a touch off-kilter, as though something else should be at the end of the bar, where her memory sees Vander with a towel slipped off his shoulder and a pint scrubbed dry beneath his palm.

"She's fond of his works with osmium," Silco muddles then, tucking his pen behind the rattish crook of his ear. She rocks back on her heels. Watches, suspiciously, as he leans over to sort through the register: a snap-shring of the drawer.

He counts out clean stacks of glinting, gold-plaited coin: seamless as a teller.

A hundred and fifty hexes—and a hundred and fifty more, atop them.

"That's—that's not—"

"I'm aware." He leans into the willowed splay of his palm, with another dagger of those mismatched eyes. She meets them, a whip-fire glare. "Haggling takes more than using your fists, girl."

Her nails fidget at her thumb. "I know."

"Then be smart about it. I've found he runs fifteen-percent mark-ups, on average."

Her teeth ache. She wants to shove the hexes back in his face, turn tail and walk straight back up those glossed stairs. Wants to snatch up every glimmering coin, out of her own spite, and stalk across the floor, before he can get in another word—but he's glancing absently over another shelf of glasses at his knee, like he knows every damn nook and cranny back there, like he's worked it as much as Vander ever did, and the thought gnaws and gnaws at her—What the hell were you?—until she can't think.

He tallies in another row of orders. Glances at her, slowly: a flit of teal and cinder, there and gone again. "Take your time," he suggests, after a breath. "Fetch yourself something to practice with. It's worth knowing your way around a bullet, in this line of work."

Metal flares on her tongue. "I don't need a gun."

Ice and fire, burning into her. "Do you intend to punch your way out of every shootout you cross, girl?" Condescending, petty old drawl: the sheared velvet of his accent heavy off his jagged teeth. "Perhaps I can fetch you a bow and arrow, if you're so inclined."

The jab eats under her skin, and sets her blood boiling.

Vi scrapes up the coins into the satchel at her hip, and storms off, out the gilded whirl of the door, without another word.

[arcanefanpage]

And just for a moment they both recognized their sister

[mintaii]

redrew an arcane piece i did back in 2022

[arcanegifs]

ARCANE LEAGUE OF LEGENDS (2021-2024)

[maiaczy]

Sometimes taking a leap forward means leaving a few things behind.

[hinamie]

"I'll show you every day that choosing to live was worth it"

some of my favourite scenes from @hijinks-n-lowjinks' fic things i would miss from the other side . this fic tore my heart out fr but like in a good way and i wanted to pay it homage the only way i know how <3

[frenchublog]

[bookish-cravings]

Ekko is literally the BIGGEST advocate for the undercity and the one that’s actually been helping people and the fact that he’s never brought into conversations about undercity activism and the fact that I’ve seen more people giving Jinx, Vi, Silco, and even CAITLYN credit for trying to help and better their lives is so??

I guarantee if Ekko was a white boy you guys wouldn’t ignore or forget about him as much

[lynnlyrae]

something something Jinx cutting her hair and Vi growing it out Jinx dyeing her hair even more colorful and Vi hiding her pink hair under layers or black dye I’m so not okay about it-

[unknown-cold]

It is true that Vander here tried to advise her to avoid problems, but unfortunately Vi did not understand this advice at the time.

How could Vi understand it when her whole life was built on fighting?

Vi only knows how to fight. Since she was a kid, she fights to protect her sister and family, then she fights in prison to survive, and when she gets out of prison, she fights again to find her sister. So after everything Vi has been through, it's natural for her to find fighting as the only way to vent her anger and sadness.

Vi is one of the most tragic characters in the show. It is right that there are other characters who have gone through and will go through bad experiences, but Vi is the most suffering and miserable of them in the show.

I really hope her story ends well, because she deserves it.

[mollysunder]

At the reading of Silco's will:

To my beloved daughter Jinx, I leave all my love, enemies, and worldly possessions. Please please please see the lawyer to discuss assets and trust fund.

To Sevika, my most competent employee, I leave you the haircut I rocked in my mid-twenties but had to abandon when I decided to psychologically reinvent myself.

Wear it wisely. Others will attack you jealously over it.

[hijinks-n-lowjinks]

me, staring at the same blank document for 5+ hours: writing is my passion✨🔥🗣️🔥✨🔥🗣️

[lazylittledragon]

i'm in one of those phases where i really wish i believed in manifesting and spellcasting and things like that bc you know when you want something so bad you're literally praying for the universe to let it happen

[spikeplate]

i just needed to doodle jinx happy, that’s all this is :•)

[arcanegifs]

ARCANE LEAGUE OF LEGENDS: 2x03 - “Finally Got The Name Right”

[maiaczy]

Your past coming back to haunt you?