For the ask game: I'm a Sevika fictive. My relationship with drugs is, if you know the show I'm sure you can assume, intimate and complicated. I was fairly partial to whiskey and cigars, and will still drink and smoke (no cigars or tobacco unfortunately, since the system doesnt want that risk, I'm restricted to chamomile cigarettes). My relationship with shimmer, though, was much more all consuming.
Part of it was what it did for me. I get a little too fatigued in a fight, in bed, in any situation I need it and I'm untouchable. I'm the scariest person in the room. It doesnt matter how badly I'm hurt, how tired I am, how far I need to go. I keep going and I get the job done. In a way it felt like an extension of silco. No matter what shape I was in it was always there, telling me I'm not done yet, I need to keep going, I have a job to do. It gave me the power and strength I needed. It took what I lost and gave me something better, something to keep me from losing again. There are a lot of days I dont know if I would have gotten through without it.
And then it was gone, and so was he. I couldnt just be untouchable any time I felt like I couldnt keep going anymore. I could have taken it manually, but that felt. I dont know, it wasnt the same. It wouldnt have been helpful for the fast paced situations I needed it most in anyway. And it felt like he was gone from it. Recreationally it felt like a mockery. And god knows I wasnt going to that little fucking rat for a new arm. So I, for the most part, dropped it after he was gone. It was hard, but it didnt feel like a choice.
Part of my relationship with it was what it did for other people. I joined the cause because my dad was one of the miners that ended up dying from lung damage from the grey. I watched how sick he got, I watched our friends, family, neighbors disappear, I watched what it did to zaun. And I watched piltover do nothing but make things worse. I wanted change. I wanted my people safe. I wanted no one else to lose like I lost. And when vander showed he didn't have the guts to do what needed to be done, I backed silco. Because, maybe his choices werent always the best, maybe he was brutal at times. But he would have burned piltover to the ground if it meant freeing zaun, if it meant a change.
And that change looked like shimmer. And I watched what that did to my people too. Some of it was bad. Some of it was very, very bad and no amount of alcohol could drown that out for me. Make me forget what I helped do. But it also changed lives. I watched disabled folks return to lives they thought they'd never get back. I watched people who were on deaths door keep going for years. I watched what it did for silco, what it did for jinx. And I do not regret it. Because shimmer, and all drugs for that matter, cannot and should not be moralized, bad or good. Because it's not a moral thing. It is a tool, and just like any other tool it can be used to fix things, and it can be used to tear them apart, and I'm dissatisfied in how much the show focused on the harm and ignored the good it could have done, it did do.
So, in all, its complicated. I think I did some horrific things, but I would always choose that over inaction. I would never take back the good that it did.
And I would take my arm back in a heartbeat.
