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revelisms · 1 year ago

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Excerpt: What You Needed

After years, Jinx and Vi are reunited—and starting to make amends.

From ‘heron blue,’ an AU where Vi and Jinx reconnect under different terms. Slow, rocky relationship rebuilding, found family messiness, and political schemings. CW: Abandonment issues, dissociation, psychosis, dysfunctional family dynamics Full story on AO3

Her painted fingers clink out a red-capped glass bottle, and hold it stiffly across from her. "You...still like the cherry ones, right?"

Vi takes it from her, slowly, criss-crossed on the blankets across from her. "You bet," she says softly. Her mouth makes a strange twist: not quite a smile. She turns the bottle in her hand. "Still like blueberry?"

Jinx screws off the cap of her own, a glittering spin off the stones. "Uh, yeah—best of the bestest."

The lights hum around them, a pleasant, blitzy static. Jinx draws up her knees, curls her arms around them, and sips. For a long, horrible moment, there's nothing for them to say. Nothing she can get out: the questions stuck in her stomach, in her heart, like lead on her tongue.

Why did you leave me—?

"When...when did you build this?" Vi's looking at the decorations all around them, the paint and the color and glow, with a quiet awe.

Jinx wonders, for a moment, if she means the alcove or the club itself. They'd kept the bones, but rebuilt it all, straight from the ground up. No more smelly storeroom—too many ghosts; all boarded up now. They'd cleaned and sanded and revarnished the floors; painted the rooms, retiled the bathrooms; brought in that beautiful imported glass to bubble around the walls, a new addition to the spaces wholly their own on the third floor, with the same old staff kitchen and storage closets and divots in the walls.

Jinx shrugs, bobbing her knee. "Oh, I dunno—years ago."

Vi's smiling, now. She looks down at the bottle in her hands: twists off the cap. "I...I missed this, y'know. All your creations."

It lights up something in Jinx's heart, like a little lamp tuned to life. "I—I never stopped, really," she says, a flash of her teeth. "Painted up my room all pretty—oh—I just got this new color in from that big guy in the third district." She props closer, with a brightening grin. "It's, like, the prettiest blue—gonna put it on Whambo. He's gonna be a nail bomb. And I might use it for some details, on Fritz—he's a smoke flare, mostly, but he can double as a firecracker launcher—cool, right? I've been trying to get the combustion ratio right, for ages, but the thing keeps fizzlin' out too early—that old doc's tried to give me equations, but ugh—anyway. Work in progress, Fritz."

And then she's telling her about Jabberwock the ray gun, that she'd engraved with the emblem of a little seahorse—and about the Zing-Dusters she'd built: the respirators they used in the air dispensaries, that she was making a new model of—and the water filtration systems they were going to pilot in the rotted hovels of the Sump, once they got the right treated metals in.

She tells her about Tullo the mechanic, a giant of a man, with hair to his knees and tattoos gaudy as a pirate's, who she gets her imports from. Tullo, who Sevika got in a fight with the other day, after he'd called her arm just for show—and Sevika was a big old ogre, just as awful as ever: she ate blood sausage and grits for breakfast—yeuch!

She's rambling, on and on: the words pouring out of her: a runoff of shaky-laughed, tense-shouldered babbling.

There's so much she doesn't say.

She doesn't tell her about Little Man. She doesn't tell her about the voices in her head, or Mylo or Claggor, or her stuffed rabbit nailed to the wall, or how she spent years and years trying to carve herself in the chasm she'd left behind, not knowing why she wasn't enough, good enough, worth enough to bring her back; or how Silco would find her beating her hands bloody in the old arcade, or how he never laughed, not really, and never, ever cried, except when he talked about Vander, and then he nearly did both; or how, sometimes, when Sevika laid her arm around her, it almost, almost felt like hers—and she does not tell her about how Powder is dead and gone and drowned, drowned in a well, drowned by Jinx's own hands, and Jinx—Jinx is strong, now.

The voices ring through her ears: a pitching, endless drone.

It's too quiet, again.

Jinx swallows, fidgeting. She lifts her eyes from the roof. Vi is just looking at her, looking and frowning, with that burning sort of sadness Jinx hates. She's looking at her, and not saying a word—and for all Jinx doesn't tell her any of that, she is terrified that in some small, terrible way, she knows it, all the same.

"You're quiet," Jinx mumbles. She rips her eyes down, again.

Vi reaches over, wraps her hand beneath her own. "I know—I know. I'm sorry, I'm just..." She huffs out a breath, turning away, staring at the bustle of the streets. "I'm just thinking." She's nervous: her hands heavy and fiddling, so warm over Jinx's own. "It's—it's just..." Vi clears her throat. "It's been so long, I've been—I've been so worried about you."

Jinx scrapes her nail over her thumb. Those words hit something unpleasant inside her—worried about you—plunge a sickly chill in her stomach: a blazing knot of self-disgust, of rage; of sharp, splintered old hurt.

The words trapped in her throat bubble out, before she can stop them. "Why..." They stick like grease on her teeth. "Why did you leave me?"

She knows they cut at her sister. She knows they sting.

Part of her wants them to.

Vi looks down. She weathers her thumb over Jinx's own. "I—I tried to get back to you, I promise." The same as she'd said, before. "I did—but I—"

"You left me." It sounds so pitiful coming out of Jinx's mouth, and she despises herself for it. She yanks her hand out from Vi's own: tucks it under her knee. "I didn't—I didn't understand—"

"I know," Vi hushes. "I know, I—there hasn't been a day I haven't regretted it. Not a single one, from every damned night I was in that cell—but I—I just—" Her shoulders sink. She's looking away, forcing air through her teeth. "I needed time."

Something blitzes up Jinx's neck: leaves her head twitching.

You're not ready!

She scowls slow at the tiles. "Away from me."

"That's not—"

I told you to stay away!

Jinx scrapes her nails against the stones. "Things changed, when you left." Air shudders against her teeth. She fights the heat broiling in her throat: blinks it quick out of her eyes. "I—I changed," she whispers.

Vi's hands fist between her knees. Something in her turns venomous: like it did in Silco, when someone said something that got under his skin; when he let his words turn harsh and biting, looming over his constituents, a shadow of a monster with red-tipped wings.

"If I'd known you were here," Vi is saying, a low firmness in the words—and Jinx knows where they're going, before she even speaks them; feels her shoulders draw firm as stone. "If I could have—I would have done anything to find you; I would have got you out of here, as soon as I—"

A numbness washes through Jinx's veins.

"Got me out," she repeats.

She feels so far away from herself. Floating.

She's seeing Little Man, with his hair still short and his arms still gangly: his hand shackled around her wrist, hard enough to crush her, pleading to a girl who didn't exist—Powder, come with me, please—we've found a place in the sewers, away from all of this, where you'll be safe—whatever he's done, I'll make sure he never gets to you, again—

"I don't need you to save me," Jinx bites out. Tension gnaws through her fingers: turns them white-knuckled on her knee.

Mylo's wrong, Powder. You're stronger than you think.

You're strong, now—just like you were always meant to be.

She wrenches her head from the words, the memories: Vi's fist colliding with her cheek, Silco's thumb sweeping against it. "I never needed you to save me, I—I needed—"

Because you're a jinx! Mylo was right!

Jinx is perfect.

"Someone else," Vi mutters. Jinx falters, ice in her lungs. Stares wide-eyed at her. Vi is frowning at the green glow beyond them, rasping her thumb against the wrapping over her knuckles. She takes in a hard, gritty breath, and eases it out. "I know," she continues. "I left you, and he—" The look in her eyes turns so strange: bitter, scathing. "He showed up." It's like the words are pulling out her teeth. Her thumb presses hard into her knuckles. "And maybe, that's—that's what you needed."

Jinx tries to swallow. Heat burns and burns in her throat. "You want me to hate him," she tests, prickling with spite. "You don't want me to be here." Flashes of color outside the edges of her vision: eyes and faces and howling words. "You don't like him—you don't like any of them—well, none of you all liked me, either—"

"That's not true—"

Ghosts are picking at her ears and clawing at her arms and too loud.

"—because I—I was just some—some loose screw, screw-up, always screwing things up—shut up!" She wrenches her head into her hands, squeezes it tight, tight between her nails, to keep her skull from splitting open. "Shut up, shut up!"

Vi's looking at her like she's broken, a wind-up toy with all the cogs gone: like something she doesn't know how to fix. Carefully, her bandaged hand lays over her knee. "That's not true, and you know it," she says gravely. The words crack. "We loved you, Powder. Vander, and Mylo, and Claggor—"

"Don't." Jinx seethes it out, feral: wrenches herself away from Vi's burning hand. "Stop." She breathes long, cavernous, heaving. "Stop, don't—I don't want to think about them—I don't want to think about them, I don't—"

Vi closes her eyes, clenches her jaw. "Okay."

"I don't," Jinx hisses again. There's too much color in her eyes, too much noise in her head.

Vi's holding her. She doesn't remember when she started holding her.

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revelisms · 2 years ago

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Excerpt: Eye for an Eye

Silco and Vi have a chat in Stillwater.

From 'heron blue,' an AU where Vi and Jinx reconnect under different terms. Slow, rocky relationship rebuilding, found family messiness, and political schemings. Full story on AO3

She sees fire. She sees red. Red on his clothes, on his hands; in his mangled, inhuman iris; on the silvered edge of his poisoned tongue.

"Vander's prodigy." She hasn't heard the sickly gravel of that voice in six years. It ripples beneath her skin, and sits there. Etches the drawling cadence of every vowel into her bones. "I regret that we've yet had the ability to speak."

A tilt of his head. Through the bars, doused in shadow, his mismatched stare sharpens. "I'd have made the journey sooner," he rumbles on, "but, you see—the time would be a waste, for a dead girl." His good eye narrows, a scathing flash of blue radium. "And yet."

Vi breathes in quick, harsh. She swallows it down.

He looks like a creature the Pilt chewed off and spit back out: a sinewed blot of shadow, bones and flesh, wrapped in leather and silk-weaved linen. There's an animal under his skin—a tidewater predator watching from the shallows, silent and still. Waiting.

She scuffs the sweat from her temple. Feigns indifference. "Who the hell are you?"

His brow perks. "Don't you remember?" His hands shift behind his back, held laxly there, as though folded around a knife. "Surely the walls haven't rotted your head that easily."

"I remember," Vi snarls, baring her teeth. "Like hell I'd forget." And she'd tried. Kindreds above and below, she'd tried to wipe her mind of that night, a lifetime over. Spite coils under her tongue. "But, y'know—don't really care about the name of some rat in the street. Might have to remind me, there."

She can't tell under the dim light whether the crook of his mouth is a sneer or a smile. It passes too quickly for her to care.

"Well. You've Vander's tongue as much as his damned fists, don't you?"

Her nails carve into her palms, hard enough to draw blood. She paces across the back of the cell, glaring.

Don't you dare say his name. Don't you dare—

Silco stands still as stone, two steps from the red line that chips over the cement floor. Silver glints in his hand. He's slipped a gilded cigarette case from the breast pocket of his coat. His thin, willowed fingers pluck one roll out, snap the case shut, and flick open the hinge of its lighter. The crackling hush of the drag he takes rattles over the stones: fills the air with a dry, ambered spice.

It's not like Vander's pipe: cheap, heady, citrus and cinnamon. It reeks of expense. It's the same peppery smoke that sits on his clothes, bittersweet and earthen, laced with juniper berry and cedar. It hisses out from his lungs, a blue thread unspooled, clouding about him in a thin haze. His dead eye leers through it.

"Come here, girl," he says, and takes a step forward. Under the ripple of the light, he's taller than she took him for; taller than she remembers, cowered on those rickety grates behind a wall of other bodies. His right eye—a frigid, dirtied blue, like the underside of a glacier—cuts to her tattered boots, and climbs. "Let me look at you."

The words gut into her, vilely. She wheels on him. Her fist slams into the bars, hard enough to make an ugly, chorusing echo through the steel. "Bastard."

"Charmed."

He stands on that thin red line, puffing away on his cigarette, and stares at her, as though trying to make sense of a riddle in a paper, or picking through the nuances of an artist's strokes. Her fingers snare hard on the bars, hard enough to stain her bloodied knuckles white. She glares right back at him. Pristine coat, lithe hands; scratched up, grayed out face; swept-back hair, flecked with silver; steel-tipped boots. There's a knife handle under his belt. A knife handle nearly in arm's reach.

"You couldn't have been more than fourteen, then," he mutters. The words carry a taint of wonder, in their remembrance. It plunges, swiftly, to distaste. "Tearing through my men, like a tank through the trenches." He scoffs. Now, he is sneering: the scarred line of his lip baring crooked teeth, his cigarette pinched between his fingers. "What good are you, left to waste away under these Piltie scum?"

"I didn't ask to be here—"

"Oh, no. You asked for revolution." His eyes spear into hers, an unwavering burn. "You were denied."

Blood ticks between her fingers, scalding on the cell bars. Those words itch into her; find the festering resentment she's left abandoned, over months and years shackled within these walls, and gnaw at it.

"You sold Vander out," she says, heat broiling just beneath the words. "You stabbed him. I saw it. You killed him—"

"Vander sold himself out, girl," and he is walking, with the slow, prowling lope of a wolf; the fluid circling of a shark in the deep. "Laid his throat under the enforcers' boots, like a mutt on a leash. I paid my dues—nine years of it—while he sat back and cowered." He strides over the red line, and stops, inches from her battered fists. "He owed me a debt," he says, plainly. His cigarette skims the grayed blot of dead flesh that stretches over his cheek. "Eye for an eye; tooth for a tooth."

Her hands shake. She sees the flames, eating up the cannery with the roar of a living thing. Hears the bellows of their arguing, split apart in fritzing static and neon-blue. "What did you do with my sister?"

He ticks the ash from his cigarette. It falls to a swirl of embers at his feet. "You, however," Silco prattles on, blithely ignoring her. His fingers wave through the air, with the nonchalance of a royal: a razor-edged flit of smoke and cinder. "Now—what I wouldn't have given to see you storm this wretched city, yourself. You still could, if you only had the gall." His heels sweep over the concrete: th-thump, th-thumping: fall still at one end of the cell. His eyes flit curiously across its hinges. "These bars, girl—tell me: have they strengthened you? Or leashed you, as well?"

She doesn't have time for this. You talk too much.

"What did you do with my sister—?"

"Jinx?"

A cold pit plunges through her stomach, and twists.

Because you're a jinx! Mylo was right!

"She's alive," he says slowly, the rasp of his low, scratched-out throat worlds away. The look on his face is unreadable: deceptively blank: scathing. "Safe," he adds, with a lilt of his head. "Though—as I'd been led to believe—you're good as dead, to her."

Vi pulls in a tight, heavy breath. "Her name is Powder."

"Her name is her own. She chose it." The dagger of his teal eye thins: hunts for something under her shaking bones, something she can't see. "From what I gather," he mulls, "it was your parting gift."

Slices in.

#fic excerpt #arcane fanfic #vi #vi arcane #silco #silco arcane #heron blue #heron!verse #will stand by the fact that we didn't get enough screentime with these two hashing it out #like!#they have so much in common #spiteful angry revolutionaries willing to do whatever they need to secure a better future for their loved ones/their city #and they have this shared thread of vander discouraging them from doing so/not being that for them #and the shared tension of jinx being pulled between them #shakes my hands at the sky #writing

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