#listen i just hhlskfj

[revelisms]

Little Numbers

Jinx has a lot of things she doesn't like—and, mainly, she doesn't like thunderstorms. Silco, slowly, is learning how to navigate that.

Rating: G | WC: 1.5k | Oneshot A lil' semi-sweet morsel of a character study, set early after Act 1. Features Jinx brainstorming a new invention, talking about her and Vi's papa, and asking Silco about his past. Silco is still figuring out how to be a Dad™️. Full story below and on AO3

They've something of a routine, in this.

He's come to expect it, over the months; on days like these, most of all. Past a spider-spiral of jade glass, glossed with gold, brews a storm: the rains speckling off the windows and battering over the roofs, a haze of gloom laid about their streets, like an old god stirred from the tides. It rakes its claws off every storefront and tile; leaves its footprints in polluted pools on the cobbles, with each howling stagger through the Lanes. It skews his office to gray tones, and ripples the walls with water-shadow.

A kindred spirit, in its own way. A comfort. But not for her.

The child dislikes the rain—much as she dislikes sunlight or the color lemon or the feeling of water in one's boots. Those menial things, though, can be corrected: a change of environment, new paints, fresh clothes. Contrary to the superstitions of those paid by his coin, however, he cannot control the weather. 

A storm will oft send the girl into a reclusive fit. Ill associations, perhaps. He knows, best of all of them, that memory's a wry devil. With a sorceress's charm, she weaves sensation into the most stubborn edges of one's nerves; she steals things that were once cherished, and tarnishes their taste to rot; she encases, cages, and gnaws at the mind. 

In his case, the work and the drink and the walks through the night's chill do enough to abide her. 

Jinx—as she is now asking to be called—is still finding her ways.

On the rare, rain-drenched instances she will emerge from her den, brave the firecracker of the thunder to peel up the bar's varnish-slick steps, he's learned to find her here: her quiet tinkerings echoing from the underbelly of his desk, her small head at his knee, a gargoyled hunch in the cave-cover it provides. 

He tends to think of the girl in feline terms: a spatting kitten clawing up the curtains. On these days, she's more akin to a pup at his feet—one he has to remind himself is there.

He shifts in his chair, pen in hand. She's brought a closet's worth of crafting supplies with her: papers, pens, metal parts, screws. His own work, housed in a series of reports, is similarly cluttered: steel mills, imports, distilleries, bullets. Cogs and wheels of his own toolbox.

"I see you're...working on something new." Rain smatters; his pen scratches. At his knee, the girl rifles through a set of oil-crayons. "Another invention of yours?" he wonders slowly, slicing the quill into three sharp lines. 

1-5-7. 

A code for Sevika: a blessing in order, with a red string. The mills were up thirty percent from the last quarter, but their chief of operations was getting skittish. Not all saw the promise in supplying disputes across the water. 

He could bend their workers' ears, differently.

A small, paint-spackled hand twists around the front of his desk. With it, a splatting page. 

The girl has her own codes, he's found. Music or mantras or poems, when the words won't seem to come to her. A color palette of emotions, when she isn't quite sure how to box them in, herself. He's picked up enough on their patterns. Blue means happy; yellow, sad; green, nervous.

She retreats her hand, quickly. In silence, he muddles over what he's left with.

No talking today, it seems.

Scrawled on the page: a flash of neon-pink. 

Her penmanship spears through the paper, jagged lettering and punctuated swirls. It has a touch of carnivalesque charm about it. Bold, vibrant, uneven.

Gilby — Gilbert — Gilly?  Like a smokie bear-BOOM! He's gonna be pink and red. See?

Underneath, she's drawn a ghoulish rendition of what appears to be a pipe bomb, with extra wires atop the head and a set of welded ears. The face wears the signature scowl she so seems to favor. Scribbled along the sides sit two claw-tipped paws.

Curiously, Silco cocks his head. She's gone so far as to outline the very chemistry she intends to use to stage the explosive. A viper-sharp mind in that little head of hers.

He hums. His pen scratches in a quiet response. A line jetted through smokie—above it, a thin respelling. Beside her drawing, he leaves notes of his own, in his sliced, sloping script.

Lovely colors. Consider a chlorate mixture — will better suit the size.

He slides the page back towards the edge of his desk, and returns to his reports. A thin set of fingers tiptoes over the varnish: slips the paper back out of sight. 

Another rumble of thunder bleeds through the streets. His pen sweeps down a second sheet. Not a moment after, he finds his work again interrupted. A series of stars have been added across her page.

Sawdust or sugar? Why is it better? How did you learn about chemistry?

Silco leans into one elbow, with a low breath. He has half a mind to send his reports to the girl; see if her sharpness for equations extends to analytics. 

Instead, his thumb slips her candy-colored questions farther over his wall of numbers, careful to avoid smudging her work. A gust of wind batters the rain against the windows. Beneath his desk, an incessant tick-ticking of metal. He scratches in his responses, lamplight glimmering on still-wet ink.

Sawdust. This design will have a greater reliance on pressure than combustion. From working the tunnels, then the doctor, then the tutors he knew of.

And so their routine begins: a question to a response, a response to a question. With each tradeoff, another smattering of doodles appears—some pink, some blue, some black.

Did you like school?

She's drawn a small galaxy, now, complete with star-shine and moons. He does his best to write around them: neat boxes of black lettering.

What I could get of it, under the company allowances. They hadn't much care for an educated workforce.

The company hadn't much care for anything, beyond bodies sloughing through that black earth, doing as they were told. Huddled in the barracks, his lamp tucked beneath his sheets, he used to read stolen books cover-to-cover and back again: histories, economics, folktales.

What was your favorite part? Literature.

The girl scribbles a violent response, to that. He lifts his brows, patiently, fingers laced. Gives a dull huff to the slash of pink she slides before him.

UGH!! Borrring! Did you ever write anything? Boring for you. Started with union pamphlets. Some essays stuck in the press.

A light thwunk of her boot hits the floor. 

What about geology? I like geology. What's your favorite rocks? Consequence of the trade, less than like it. Minerals, not rocks. Covellite, jasper, bloodstone.

Each mineral hosts their own illustrations, by the time she turns the sheet back to him: a blue comet, a red heart, a green hand.

What were the mines like?

His pen idles on the page. 

"Am I to answer that in stanza, or in a speech?" he muses, dryly. 

Beneath his desk, a small sound, like an animal stifling a hiccup. After a moment, Jinx speaks. "Papa worked in the mines."

She hardly ever mentions her parents. When she does, it is with the same veneration that she speaks of her sister: like something too far gone to touch; something feared and worshipped, in turns.  

Silco thinks of his own father, nigh-nonexistent father, with a lineage stripped from him since birth, and feels his nail bite into his thumb. 

He thinks of Vander, for a short, vile moment—and then he doesn't.

"Then you know of it, enough," he mutters, regathering himself.

A feather-light touch toys at the clasps of his boot. "Papa hated them." 

He is back in them, briefly. Back in that hellish chill, dry as death; in the red-lamped glow signposting ten-meter intervals in the pitch; in the feel of the rock at his back, a crawlspace of a work path, ore and diamonds rattling in his carts; the smell of sulphur and sweat and dust in his lungs, thick as sludge in his throat. 

His pen twitches.

"Most the lot of us did, child," he says, far quieter than he intends, "and most hadn't a choice." 

Jinx says nothing to that, for a long moment. She makes no move to retrieve her sheet, either. But he feels her shift: a firmer pressure at his knee, her tinkerings forgotten. 

He lingers over her drawings. 

Pink. The color of her shame and anger.

Silco drags his thumb against the ridges of his fingertips, worries over the hard calluses the years of that labor had left: scar tissue too deep to fade. In the silence, his reports tether back his attention. Still, Jinx sits. 

He marks three sharp lines: another code for his right-hand. A gloss of green light begins to break through the gray. "These wretched things in life," he finds himself murmuring, "we all must endure. But we are stronger, for having endured them." His other hand loosens from his temple, finds the soft crown of the girl's head, and rests there. "Remember that."

Jinx draws in a small breath, picking at a piece of tin. 

For minutes, she doesn't say a word. Then, quietly: "Okay."

The rains lighten. He returns to his work, leafing through new proposals and policy drafts. 

At his feet, the child scribbles. 

Pink and blue, and pink and blue.