#emeraqua

Jinx sat in her workshop; a cold empty space that sat on the wings of a dusty, decommissioned turbine engine. Her emotions rapidly spun in a constant cycle of despair, numbing apathy, and mania. She had lost track of the time, unsure if it had been days or maybe weeks; but it had already been a month since Piltover’s sheriff had killed Silco. And against Jinx’s own desperate wishes, her mind dragged itself back to her last moments with him, like a fingernail picking at a scabbing wound.

After the deafening silence that shortly followed the loud ringing of the sheriff’s rifle, the noise and space around her started to blur, when Jinx caught sight of him on the ground. Breaths labored, and an undeniable, glaring, wound in his chest. Silco grasped at it weakly, and like the tremored movements of a ghost, Jinx could feel her body move languidly on its own.

Her pistol had long ago slipped from her fingertips to the concrete floor of the empty Shimmer factory. She thought she could hear shifts in the distance, the two Vastaya escaping the building from behind her, but she hardly recognized it. As her footsteps finally reached where the Chembaron lay, she dropped to her knees in front of him, unaware of just how much her body was trembling.

Her mouth opened but she couldn’t hear any words come out, palms in the air swaying just above his body, unsure of where to put them. How can she fix it? What does she need to do to fix this? He winced, and with the remaining strength he had left, Silco turned his head to look at her. She cupped his face,

“This isn’t happening.” Jinx heard the words clearly, as if spoken right in her ear, but she didn’t know who had said it. Tears started to well at the waterline of her lids, and her lips trembled violently, yet her voice was barely a whisper. “Silco, no.” The man had a pained expression. But despite the critical wound, it almost seemed as if the woeful gaze in his eyes was for another reason entirely. He looked at her as he willed himself to say something in his shallowing breaths.

“Don’t cry, little one.”

Jinx tried to pull him up in a hollow panic, scrambling uselessly on her feet, “Let’s go, Silco. We have to get out of here right now--...the doctor, he’ll--”

He lifted an unsteady hand, but he was already too weak to keep it held up. Jinx grabbed it before it could fall back to his lap, and she placed his palm on her cheek. Her eyes wavered and she watched him speak,

“You’re greater than these walls that contain you.” Her eyes widened. She was confused, because she didn’t understand why Silco was speaking that way. Why did he sound that way?

“No, no. I don’t know what you’re–” Silco continued, interrupting Jinx.

“Jinx. You’re more than any of this. Perfect. This prison, it isn’t meant for you.”

There was a tone in Silco’s last words that almost felt like a command. He needed her to believe what he was saying. Then, time stilled, and there was a moment of deafening silence. Before Jinx had even realized, the hand that she held to her face had already become limp. The softness in his voice had broken her. He’d never spoken that way with the girl before. And to come to the realization that she would never hear that voice again, it had plunged her into a chasm of despair.

She could no longer hear the labored breaths of the man who raised her. The man who plucked her from the grimy floor amidst the burning embers just outside these very walls, those years ago. Jinx clung to him and sobbed. The blood from his wound stained her shirt, and she could still feel the vestiges of warmth ebb from his slowly cooling body. She whispered in choking cries,

“Silco, no. Don’t do this. Don’t leave me, please.” Her voice cracked, and she could barely breathe. The tears blurred her vision, as the droplets landed and mixed in with the blood that continued to pool at his chest. In the corner of her eye, she could see movement. It had only briefly torn her away from the moment, but it was enough to plunge the immense—excruciating—grief that plagued her down into a deep, dark void.

The movement she saw was Caitlyn, in the distance, climbing down from the rafters. The sheriff swallowed a lump in her throat with the thought that a man lay dead because of her. And even if he were the crime lord of the Undercity, nothing could prepare her for how it would feel like to take someone’s life for the first time. She pushed the thoughts aside; she needed to get to the stones. She had hoped to make it down in time to gather them from the ground while Jinx was distracted, as they had still lay on the floor from when the young Zaunite had dropped them earlier that evening. But before the sheriff could even make it halfway down, Jinx had already stood up.

The girl languidly walked to the stones that littered the asphalt, without urgency. Cobalt bangs covered her eyes and swayed lightly with her movements, shimmer-infused irises gleaming through them every now and again. She bent down and slowly picked each of them up, as Caitlyn’s breath stilled in a quelling anxiety. The only thing the woman could do was watch from the distance.

“Do you know what it’s like to lose someone?” Jinx’s words reverberated in the empty cannery, as the young girl held them up to study in the dim light. Were these really worth it? These stones?

The sheriff watched in horror from the rafters, as her eyes widened. The sweat that formed on her palms forced her to grip onto the steel beams even tighter. “Even if I destroyed your whole city, you would never understand what I’ve lost.” Jinx’s usual playful, reckless, tone had abandoned her throat and made way for a cold, hollow, timbre. The words that had come from her mouth suddenly held more weight. “You took everything from me.” Jinx spoke her last words painstakingly in short syllables, as if the word everything was Silco’s name itself, and Caitlyn could feel the girl’s words squeeze her heart.

I’m sorry.

The sheriff tried to steady her breaths, as she watched the grieving girl walk without haste to the rocket launcher that patiently waited at the table.

“S-stop!” Caitlyn yelled desperately. The sheriff continued to climb down, but her speed was nothing compared to the girl’s short distance to the table. Caitlyn cursed, wishing anything for her legs to be quicker. The maddening absurdity of the situation was almost laughable. She fumbled down the beam so quick that she nearly missed a step and plunged to the floor from the rafters.

Without another word, the young Zaunite placed the Hextech gemstones in the chamber, one by one. She picked up the weapon and walked to the edge of the cannery, to an open balcony that led its view to Piltover’s skyline. From this location, at the edge of Zaun, only the river stood between the two cities at her feet. But in the space between them, above the waters, the air that filled the expanse of The Undercity and the City of Progress…there was nothing that separated them from each other.

She could hear panicked protests from the sheriff fading into the background, as she hoisted the rocket launcher above her shoulder. The heavy metal bit into her skin, but it only served as a brief, fleeting, reprieve. Jinx lifted it and aimed it at the council chambers in the distance, her purple, iridescent tears stained on her cheeks as she pulled the trigger.

The immense force that erupted from the launcher had pushed Jinx back, but she braced herself and kept herself from falling backwards. When the rocket released from the barrel, it tore through the air. Caitlyn watched as it sped towards the tower, but at that moment, it almost felt as if time had slowed. The painful seconds felt like minutes, and the sheriff’s heart wrenched from her utter helplessness as she could only watch. She couldn’t stop it. The rocket hit the chambers, and Caitlyn let out a strangled cry.

Not soon after, Jinx turned and aimed the massive weapon at a chemical reactor in the building. She didn’t care what came of her at that moment, all she needed was to see everything else around her fall apart. The rocket hit the machine and the explosion rattled the whole building. Smoke erupted in every direction, and the glass from the high windows shattered, spewing out. Shards fell down like rain, and a few nicked her skin, but all the pain did was remind her that she was alive, and that he wasn’t.

Jinx walked towards Silco’s cold body and knelt with him again, as the fire began to lick at her surroundings. She placed her fingertips softly over his dark eye, and gently shut the lid. She had no intention of leaving. The young girl wrapped her arm around the man’s shoulder, her frame jumping slightly at each hiccup that hit her rib cage. The enveloping smoke forced small coughs from Jinx, but she deliberately welcomed the smoke into her lungs, betraying her body’s natural instinct to expel the foreign substance that reached her cavity.

Suddenly, a strong, augmented arm tore her up from the ground.

“What the hell have you done! Are you insane?” Sevika glared at her, livid, her gray eyes hard and piercing. But when she looked down at the Chembaron, she faltered. Any remnants of anger, or irritation from the girl who had caused yet another disaster, had all but faded. Silco’s subordinate swallowed, as her eyes widened and her brows furrowed, taking in the Eye of Zaun’s limp body. She looked back at Jinx.

The girl’s stare was hollow, her face grey. If the woman didn’t feel the slight tug of Jinx’s arm against her metal grip, she would’ve thought the girl was dead, too. Sevika cursed out loud, before hoisting Silco’s body over her shoulder and carrying him and Jinx out of the burning factory.

Jinx let herself be taken away by Sevika’s strength, briefly looking back at the cannery. The purple plumes erupted and reflected off the fading magenta in her own eyes. The sound of chaos that would normally excite her fell on deaf ears. At that moment she didn’t know exactly how she felt, as she watched the building burn. A tugging grief began to resurface through the numbness: at least that place would be gone, for good this time. And there’d be nothing on the map that could show anyone where she had lost everything. Jinx turned to look at Silco’s body.