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elizaviento · 1 month ago

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I'm FLOORED. This is everything I've wanted for the early days of Jinx and Silco. No one does it like you!

Blink Once For Yes, Twice For No - Chapter One

Words: 5,027

Summary: In the year following the cannery explosion, Jinx struggles with her nightmares making her relive the trauma over and over. Silco should feel triumphant after killing his worst enemy and taking control of the underground, but his dreams are no kinder to him than hers. And then an old affliction he thought he outgrew long ago resurfaces to make sleeping a living hell.

AKA Silco learns how to be a parent to a troubled child while dealing with (denying) his own problems AKA subjecting Silco to the horrors of sleep paralysis.

Thank you so much @avicides and @aulwil for betaing this for me. I couldnt have gotten it where it is without you 💜💜

AO3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/63015346/

He anticipated Vander’s adopted strays coming to his rescue. He prepared for them to get Vander out of his restraints, maybe even find a way out of that room. He wanted them to show up. His plans depended on the destruction of Vander’s reputation as a brave and heroic figure. Murdered by a rival makes Vander a martyr. Fleeing the Underground to protect his precious children at the first threat of violence from Piltover, however, makes Vander a coward, and not a worthy leader.

He never thought himself capable of killing children for the cause. It still sounds antithetical to the entire mission. But the stagnation these specific children cost Zaun, how they liquified Vander’s spine and made him betray their movement—their entire city—something had to give. They would secure Vander’s martyrdom, so they had to die with him.

He didn’t quite anticipate the strength of the pink-haired one. So much of the Vander he used to know alive in her furious eyes, armed with Vander’s old gloves to drive the point home. The sight brought bile to his throat, rage and malice seething in his gut. Both at her loyalty to Vander, and at her squandered potential under Vander’s traitorous pacifism.

And he definitely did not anticipate them showing up with bombs.

One of Deckard’s group mentioned the smallest one threw a dud grenade at him, so perhaps he should have prepared for something, but a flash-bang or a nail bomb didn't obliterate his entire factory. That explosion was energy on a scale he’d never seen before. He watched Sevika’s arm vaporize, a fate meant for him had she not pushed him out of the blast. At the time, he thought the little brats blew the place up on purpose, some sort of last resort plan for their rescue mission that backfired on them.

Vander didn’t escape, at least. Years of envisioning his revenge, the context always different, but the actions always the same: killing his former brother with the knife that saved him from a watery grave. He plunged the blade clean through a kidney and the bastard still managed to wrap a fist around his throat. Again. Then a shot to the gut, aiming for the same spot he stabbed to escape the river. Vander’s immense grip around his throat weakening, his body slumping and strength failing as he bled out, until someone as feeble as Silco could push him off a ledge.

The factory exploded several times over—Silco’s entire Shimmer supply along with it—and it seemed the only victory he managed in this entire operation still pulled one last stunt by consuming a vial of Shimmer and saving the damn kid. The last one standing. Well, second to last.

Silco walked the perimeter of what remained of the cannery to see how far Vander got, his victory soured and mood ruined. He found some satisfaction in the fact that consuming Shimmer didn’t heal Vander’s wounds. He knew its healing properties firsthand, but it can’t cure a mortal wound. He aimed well with the knife and vanquished his enemy.

He expected the pink-haired child to stay with him, mourn over the dead body with that sentimentality Vander always peddled, even at his best. There was a child with the body when he found it, but not the one that laid waste to most of his crew. The youngest. The final loose end. Crumpled over on the ground and sobbing with her entire body, backlit by fire in the freezing rain.

All four of the strays needed to die for him to destroy Vander’s reputation, but as his hand clenched the blade in preparation to take another life, an instinct he knew better than to ignore implored him to stay his hand. Hide the knife. Find the sister, first, the greater threat. This scrawny little thing has nowhere to go and no fight in her at all, so should stay put long enough for him to kill her sister and come back.

How wrong of him to assume something so frail and broken had no fight in her. The frenzy in the gray eyes that looked up at him, tears and snot indistinguishable from the rain running down her face. Chest heaving, teeth bared in feral desperation, she tackled him with every ounce of strength in her. Knocking him—him—on his ass in the wet and mud, the knife clattering out of his hand somewhere behind them.

The move stunned him still and speechless, his breath coming hard and heavy as they skidded to a stop. He expected her to reach for the weapon after disarming him—she attacked him, after all. Or to try biting him, at least. His mind raced with the possibilities and how best to defend himself against an opponent with nothing to lose but her life. He, of all people, should know how fierce the fire burns in the weakest and most burdened of Zaun’s children.

Lanky arms wrapped around his torso and squeezed him tight, her head pressed into him like she wanted to bury it inside his ribs. She didn’t bite, she didn’t attack, she didn’t reach for the knife. She settled herself between his legs, against his chest, around his back, and lamented the loss of a sister. A sacred bond forsaken with such malice over a single accident.

He looked at the corpse of the man he once called his brother. Then at the child who, in that moment, was as lost and afraid as him the day that brother tried to kill him. His body survived, but it took him months… years, really… to recover, and he had to do it alone. He felt no remorse for killing her caretaker, but the pain of abandonment by the only family you had in the world…

Well. He of all people should know.

He gathered the blubbering mess of limbs into his arms, rested his head against hers, and spoke the words he’d spent so many nights yearning for someone, anyone, to tell him all those years ago. A promise he would come to uphold every day for the girl he’d someday call his baby blue.

“It’s okay.”

When he brought her home, she slept like the dead for two consecutive days. He checked on her several times out of concern she’d succumbed to the grief. Not dead, but exhausted from bearing the weight of it all.

He later learned her birth parents died during the Day of Ash, and that she and her sister witnessed the carnage by sneaking out. Vander, as the only survivor on Zaun’s side, took them in and abandoned all his ideals to shelter them. Made a feeble “deal” with Piltover’s sheriff for “peace” in the Underground, the control of which belonged to the Enforcers, not to Vander. Peace built on a temporary agreement to keep each to their own, which Vander has no way of holding them accountable for breaking. He calls it peace, but handing your oppressors the leash to your collar accomplishes nothing. Security theater, nothing more. The peace treaty will end when Vander dies, and when the curtain rises, nothing will have changed, and might have even gotten worse.

For his part, Silco expected some annoying dreams. Unpleasant, even. Stories born of stress and fatigue that laugh in the face of attempts at “sleeping it off.” His dream life seldom provides a reprieve from the harrows of his waking life, but they’re not nightmares. Stress dreams, sometimes stressful memories, nothing more. Not nightmares.

The night following the cannery incident, he dreamed of the day Vander tried drowning him in the Pilt. Of Vander’s towering shadow above him, flickering from Silco thrashing for his life. Of the only breaths he managed through the fists clamped around his throat filling his lungs more and more with toxic water. Of the agonizing, indescribable pain of chemicals burning and disintegrating live flesh, open nerves, the delicate membranes of his eye.

The phantom pain of his eye stripping apart layer by layer woke him. His emotional mind told him to run to the bathroom and inspect it, find his syringe to inject more Shimmer to stop the inflammation, but he resisted such folly. A dream, nothing more. His mind processing everything that happened: his revenge, and vanquishing the largest obstacle in the way of Zaun’s independence in one fell swoop. Closure has funny ways of settling in.

About a month after the incident, he dreamed of the events leading up to the explosion. When the bomb went off, Sevika didn’t reach him in time, and it vaporized him instead of her arm. He jolted awake out of that one and pinched the bridge of his nose in exasperation. Only a stress dream, no need for such drama. He fell back to sleep without a problem, but the flashes of blue and white on the backs of his eyelid tried keeping him awake.

His dreams left him alone after that. Mild stories or nights with no dreams at all. Closure procured, or so he thought.

The first time Jinx had a nightmare in his care, barely two months after taking her in, she screamed loud enough to wake him. A blood-curdling, adrenaline-spiking scream, the kind no one can fake. A sound impossible to make outside of true mortal peril. He leaped out of his bed, armed with the dagger he keeps under his pillow to burst through her bedroom door.

No intruders. Only a bawling Jinx, curled up with her legs underneath her and covering her head. The door opening didn’t make her look up. She may not have even heard it over the power of her sobbing.

“Jinx,” Silco called, “what is it? What happened?”

She didn’t look up. He heard her trying to regain control over her frantic breathing, but the shakes wouldn’t yield. All of this was still so new. He was still learning her. Unsure what he could do, he sat on her bed, setting the knife on her nightstand. She likes physical touch; would she want that right now? Should he touch her or wait for her to ask? What if she panicked? He didn’t want to cause her any more distress.

While his hand wavered, Jinx’s eye poked out from under her face, still buried in her blankets. She crawled into his lap, stuck her face in the dip between his thighs, crossed her arms over her head on his leg, and continued crying. For several minutes, he rested his hand on her back, rubbing it sometimes, but not wanting to do too much. In time, her sobs lost their intensity, her small body stopped shaking, and she could pick up her head. Her first words to him hurt.

“I’m sorry,” she said through another heave of her chest. She turned her head up to look at him. “I-I’m s-sorry I woke you. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to apologize for,” he said. “I was only worried something happened. Are you alright?”

“I-I-I—” more involuntary snaps of her diaphragm before she could explain, “it was a bad dream. Just a stupid dream. I’m fine. I’m sorry I made you worried for no reason. I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t ‘no reason,’ you had a nightmare,” he said. “That’s a good reason. You’ve been through a lot. There’s no shame in it. Adults have bad dreams sometimes, too.”

Sniffling, she shifted to lie in the fetal position so she could see him better, with her head still in his lap. The cuff of her sleeve wiped her nose. Oh, the indignity of bawling your eyes out. “Really?”

“Really. Do you want to talk about it? You don’t have to, but if you want to, I’d like to listen.”

Her lower lip trembled. “I…it was…it was my fault. All of it was my fault.”

He cradled her head with one hand so he could wipe her tears away with his thumb. “What was your fault?”

She leaned in to the touch. “I… I blew up the factory. It was my monkey bomb. I killed everyone… except Vi. She left me because I killed them. Mylo and Claggor and Vander. I fell off the building when the bomb went off, but I saw them all dead in my dream, all crushed and bloody. Their ghosts found my dream and they turned into monsters and they screamed and screamed and screamed at me because it was my fault and dying hurt and they were so mad.” Fresh tears wet her face. “They wouldn’t let me wake up, they kept playing it over and over like it was a picture show. I tried to scream so many times but nothing came out. Then I woke up. I guess I finally got a scream out, if you heard it. Sorry.”

He meditated on her words before responding, steady and calm. “You didn’t kill Vander. He survived the blast with only a few scratches. I killed him. I stabbed him twice with the knife I stole from him when he tried to drown me. You remember me telling you about that?” She nodded, so he continued. “He drank a vial of Shimmer to hold on for a little longer, long enough to get Vi out,”—he couldn’t help sneering her name—“before it exploded again, but he died because of the wounds I gave him.” He chuckled. “That was a very impressive bomb. You have a talent for gadgetry.”

“They never work, they only mess everything up,” she grumbled, defeat in her voice. “I put some magicky exploding crystals in that one, that’s the only reason it worked. Now I’m back to them not working.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I never want to see those things again.”

“Fixable in time,” he assured her, “on both accounts. We’ll find you some resources and see where they’re going wrong. They won’t mess everything up when they work. And they will work.”

She turned to lie flat on her back, still using his thighs as a headrest, hands drawn up over her chest. He moved his hand to rest on the top of her head. No pressure, no petting, only a comforting presence. She wiped the last of her tears off her face. “I don’t wanna go back to sleep. They’re gonna come back, I know it. I see them when I’m awake sometimes, too.”

He filed that one away under crucial information and considered the rest of what she said for a few moments. Compared it to everything else he knew about her thus far, and reflected on what he felt comfortable with, or not. “Would you like me to stay with you?”

Her eyes widened. “You—?” No other words got through.

He offered a reassuring smile. “I know my way around monsters. I make them, and I control them. Those ghosts won’t dare haunt you while I’m here.”

Silence. Locked eyes. He relaxed his entire body, softened his expression, and offered a reserved smile. His fingers rubbed faint lines into her hair, the smallest gesture with a featherlight touch she may not have even felt. Her eyes stayed wide, scanning his face. Looking for a catch in his words, perhaps. Or a lie.

“Why do you have an eye patch? You look like a pirate,” she said. She gives him whiplash sometimes with how fast her thoughts can switch between vastly unrelated topics.

He forgot he had it on. He doesn’t feel it on his face anymore when he wears it at night, so acclimatized to its presence. He chuckled. “I can’t close this eye. I have to cover it when I sleep, in case I end up on my side.”

She seemed satisfied with the answer. Sitting up, Jinx crawled to the other side of the bed and slipped under the blankets. And Silco processed what his offer required him to do. In truth, he’d never shared a bed with someone before, much less a child.

After hesitating for a few beats, he folded the blankets open enough to settle under them, pulling them up to where she had positioned them on herself. She turned to face him, so he turned to face her, glad she chose the side of the bed that put him on his left so he could meet her eyes.

“And why are your pajamas so fancy? They look like topsider pajamas.”

He beat down his surly reaction. If anyone else compared him to a Piltovan, he’d end their miserable life. “I like being comfortable,” he answered, calm and simple, and offered her his arm.

She pinched the shiny red sleeve between her fingers. Her lips formed an “O” and she took it in a fist. “What is it? It’s so soft.”

“It’s silk. Have you heard of it?” He asked. She shook her head. “It comes from spiders, or caterpillars. People collect the silk they make and make clothes with it. It takes a long time, and is very painstaking, so silk clothes are expensive.”

Her transfixed countenance meant it possible she heard none of that. She kept her eyes focused on her fingers, still rubbing his sleeve.

“None in the Underground have the resources to make it, or the coin to afford it, with things as they are now,” he continued. “I’d like to see that change. We all deserve the same luxuries the topsiders enjoy, if we want them. I want us to have the choice.” He smiled. “Would you like your own?”

That got her attention. Wide, excited eyes met his again. “Yes! Can mine have little monkeys on them, or sharks or something? Yours are kinda boring.”

The ease with which his smile widened surprised him. “I can’t guarantee it, but I’ll ask.”

She drifted off not long after, and he stayed awake to watch her sleep. Both to make sure another nightmare wouldn’t strike, and to contemplate the smile still lingering in his face muscles. Genuine, involuntary smiles and humor doesn’t happen to him. Nor did he make a habit of offing comfort and emotional support to others, but his interactions with her always felt like second nature. Thinking without thinking.

Humming in his throat, he snipped himself free of the web of thoughts trying to ensnare him. He forced his body to relax, adjusted his position on her pillows, and studied her again. An unknown intuition compelled him to tuck the blankets tighter around her. The way she nestled into it did… something… created a pinch in his chest. The first spark of connection between two hearts damaged by betrayal, beating as one through the night as they enjoyed the solace of not sleeping alone.

Her nightmare repeated itself a couple of nights later. He ran to her with the same urgency on the chance something else made her scream. To his relief, only another nightmare, one that had her hugging her legs with her head tucked under her arms this time. He sat on her bed and let her come to him again. She put herself in his lap, and he rubbed her upper back while she rode out the panic. When the sobs subsided, she stayed in his lap but didn’t speak. She hid her face from him so he couldn’t see it pinching in humiliation.

“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “I’ll never think any lesser of you for having nightmares.”

She shifted so she could see him. “Vi wouldn’t be having nightmares,” she said, dejected. “She was always the strong one. I’ve always been the weak one.” Her fists clenched in frustration. “I don’t want to be this weak anymore. I’m not useful to you if I’m weak.”

He recognized her explosive potential even before she told him about the cannery bomb. Her tinkering and crude diagrams littered her bedroom and spilled into the living room. He had no need to fashion her into a weapon: she chose that path for herself. Nonetheless, her words twisted a knot in his chest, squeezed around his heart. “You’re not weak. You’ve been through a lot. And you aren’t a tool to me. You’re not a thing to be used.”

She sniffled. “What am I?”

He pondered a moment, looking for the right words. “Resilient,” he said. “When I look at you, I see a force of nature that will, in time, lay waste to any challenge the world throws at you.” Smiling, he rested a hand on the top of her head. “You won’t be a child forever. You will grow, you will learn, and you will prove everyone who doubted you wrong. I’m looking forward to watching you come into your own.”

Silent tears still escaped down her cheeks, but the smile she returned him reached her eyes. Not for the first time, it struck him how beautiful she was. Her eyes projected her entire soul for him, raw and vulnerable and so much stronger than she would let herself believe.

Her gaze moved off of him into the room behind him. She lost her smile when she met his eyes again, her brows and the corners of her eyes pinched. They flicked out and back one more time.

He had an idea of what she saw behind him. Rubbing her hair with his fingers, the words flowed out of his mouth without thought or resistance. “Would you like to stay with me tonight?”

Her face relaxed. “With you? Like, in your room?”

“Yes.” He slept fine in her bed last time. They both fit comfortably on it. And the mattress deserved its price tag, but he prefers sleeping in his own bed. He doesn’t want her to have to share a room with her ghosts when she could stay in his.

He offered his hand. She placed hers in it, crawled to the edge of the bed, and threw her legs over to stand. Her hand stayed in his on the way to his bedroom. Opening the door, he gestured for her to enter so he could close it behind them and turned on the lights.

“Wow, your bed is huge,” she said. "What do you need all that space for?”

He chuckled. “Because I wanted it.”

“Yeah but why?” she asked as she started to poke around. She inspected all the paintings, books, and trinkets on the shelves and dressers; opened drawers and the closet.

Her back to him made her miss his smirk. “Why not?”

He sat on the bed while she satisfied her curiosity. The snooping didn’t bother him; he had nothing to hide from her. He couldn’t imagine letting anyone else into this room, let alone allowing them to invade his privacy like this. That should bother him—he won't get close to anyone ever again—but try as he might, he can't bring himself to care. Keeping her calm and comfortable benefits them both.

The blankets stayed tossed back from when he bolted out of bed to check on her. He pushed them away to slide back in, leaving room for her to join him when she was ready. She still thought of herself as an intruder in his life, and he never wanted to pressure her. Invite her in, stay patient, and let her come to him at her own pace. He didn’t know what to call their relationship yet, or how to say where it might go, but he knew for certain he would never force anything on her. He would get however close she wanted them to get, and no further.

Her finger rested below her bottom lip as she finished looking around. When their eyes met, the curiosity in hers drained to uncertainty. He smiled and settled in, smoothing the open sheets next to him. She stood with her arms shielding her chest for six heart-wrenching seconds before permitting herself to crawl in with him. Turning down the light, he helped draw the blankets up around her. He left them a candle flame’s worth of light to talk away some of her anxious energy.

“Vi used to do this for me,” she said, tone unreadable, “if I ever had a bad dream, or if we were playing monsters and I got scared. I’m supposed to be old enough not to be so scared anymore.”

“Fear doesn’t go away as you get older,” he said. “You get better at doing things while afraid.”

She settled deeper into her pillow. “Did you have bad dreams when you were my age?”

“All the time.”

Her eyes widened. He knew she wouldn’t expect that answer. He kept his face soft, not letting the smugness show.

“What were they about?”

“The mines, usually.”

“You worked in the mines?”

He hummed in assent. “From the day I was strong enough to use the picks until the major collapse that closed most of them down. I used to have dreams about getting lost down there, or stuck in the crevasses they had me scout, or caught in a collapse.”

“Did it ever happen?”

“Not to me, but to many of us. Between the gasses and the cave-ins, we lost people so often we avoided getting too well acquainted.”

“You lost friends down there?” She asked. He nodded. “Did you see them in your dreams?”

“Perhaps,” he said. “It’s been a while. Most of what I remember was getting trapped down there alone. I still had to go back to work in them the next day, and I was more likely to have an accident if I was tired, so I learned how to go back to sleep even if I was afraid.” He added for her benefit, “I don’t recall ever having two in the same night.”

The shadows around them stirred with echoes of monsters long abandoned. An old friend never quite forgotten, but left where it belonged: buried under the rubble in the tunnels. The formless thing that used to sit on his chest and hold him prisoner between wakefulness and sleep. With his mind alert and his eyes active, but the rest of his body rigid and immune to his commands to move. Sometimes it brought the walls down around them, which spooked him awake.

He thought of it like a game, back then, for the sake of his sanity. A trickster that shook up his dreams on occasion, and made them more lifelike than necessary. Too lifelike to call a dream, really; more like a hallucination, yet his body remained paralyzed, as if still asleep. He spent more nights than he’d care to admit terrified of the demon returning to mock him as it held him down.

She sighed and drew the blankets tighter around herself. “I hate that it plays over and over. And then sometimes they change the details. Things that didn’t really happen that makes it even worse. Like the explosion ripped them apart instead of crushing them.” Tears tickled at her waterlines. “You died in the explosion tonight. Everyone did. It killed everyone and I was alone. No one found me in the rain after because there was no one left to find me.”

Compulsions tugged on the tendons in his arm, urging him to cup her face or pull her closer; to reach out to her, somehow. When he refrained, the tension migrated to squeeze his heart. “You aren’t alone. And I don’t want you to feel that way. If you’re ever scared, and having me with you would help, then I want to be here for you.”

Her eyes shone with the war raging behind them, the yearning for acceptance at odds with the schema of being a burden. “Really?”

“Really. If you’re scared, let yourself in here and stay with me. We can talk if you want, but I won’t ask, and we’ll just go to sleep.”

She scooted closer to him, now almost nose-to-nose on the pillows. Her eyes scanned his face as she processed his words. “When you were my age and you had a bad dream, did you have anyone to stay with you?”

He wondered how long it would take her to get there. She never let their topics stay focused on her, and took every opportunity to ask about his life before meeting her. Warm but sincere, he breathed a simple, sincere, “no.”

She nuzzled into his chest, molding herself against him and slipping her arm under his in a loose embrace. “I would have stayed with you.”

He could only hum an assent through the shock and fog in his mind. His heart pounded against his ribs, the dizzying pulse in his skull churning his stomach. He willed his body to relax—he didn’t want her to think she’d done anything wrong or that he didn’t want her to touch him.

It shakes him to his core every time she does because…well, he can’t remember a time anyone wanted to touch him.

He draped his arm around her, resting his hand on the mattress behind her to return the hug without overstepping. Would his hand on her back be overstepping? It might. He doesn’t want to push her.

Her breathing slowed, and all the tension keeping her so snug against him released. He adjusted his position in slow, delicate movements until they slotted together comfortably. Part of him wanted to stay awake all night to watch her, to wake her if he saw a nightmare playing on her face, or to make sure the ghosts hiding in her bedroom didn’t follow her in here. The sentimentality of a younger man he left for dead a long, long time ago trying to wake up, and bringing the past with it.

Whispers in low tones stirred the shadows again, their chilling weight tickling at his muscles in all their favorite places. He denied the trickster’s eyes the right to manifest. The scent of Jinx’s hair and the fluttering of her heart against his chest carried him into a warm, dreamless sleep.

#instant fav #silco #jinx

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