Maisie

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It was nice, having a space that belonged to her and her alone for the first time. Getting to paint the floor and blast music and have a cluttered desk– she’s never been able to have free rein like that before. Sure, her siblings weren’t overbearing about their shared space, and Silco was mostly hands-off about her room, but this was different. It was really, truly hers.

No one had ever hurt her there; no one had ever left.

Though it didn’t quite feel that way in the moment that she found Vi’s stuffed bunny in a chest she had hauled up from her room at the bar.

The little patched-up, worn-down rabbit with Vi’s name stitched along its soft ear.

She hadn’t seen it in years now, but there it was, staring at her with its button eyes from where it sat in the box.

She remembered now, how she had hidden it away like a cursed object after the explosion. Not immediately. No, it took a few weeks for the bunny’s presence to become too much in the wake of her abandonment by its original owner.

The bunny couldn’t comfort her; it could only remind her of what she lost, and the fact that she was no different than an old favorite toy left behind in the rain, just like it.

Vi had loved that thing, and she gave it to Powder because she had loved her. But then it was just her and the bunny, both there and alone in the bedroom the sisters had grown up in together. She didn’t want to see the rabbit again after that.

Still, now, after years of hiding from it, she gingerly picked up the floppy plush, holding it at an arm’s length as she studied it quietly.

“You’ve seen better days,” she assessed softly.

It was just a children’s toy, the sight of it shouldn’t have felt like a knife to the gut the way it did, but Janna, it did.

It was so much smaller than she remembered. Maybe it was just because she grew up. It’s funny, she used to want to grow up so badly– to be older and taller and stronger like her siblings, but now she just wished she could be a little kid again. Start over. Be the person her sister loved before she had left her tucked away in some dark, dusty box.

“I guess we both have,” she whispered in amendment.

She didn’t really know what to do with it this time. It didn’t seem right to hide it away again, but she also didn’t know if she could bear it staring into her soul like a twisted reflection.

It was hard not to wonder if Vi ever regretted giving it to her. Maybe she’s somewhere now missing the stuffed childhood memento more than she missed her baby sister.

She shook the thoughts from her head with a rough movement, quickly tossing the stuffed rabbit onto her shelf of gadgets and turning away from it.

Maybe she should have put it right back where she found it, but maybe the rabbit was just as tired of being alone as she was.

————

Oh!

(Unless you are my sister. Don’t even.)

Following the death of her family in an accident she caused, Jinx is alone, for the first time in her life. The loneliness was always the worst part- missing her sister even as she resents her abandonment, longing for Ekko even as she becomes something he hates, and the one person left to look out for her seems to be pushing her further into the darkness.

After years of descending further into her life as Jinx and the loneliness that comes with it, after a night with her childhood best friend turned enemy, she finds that she'll never be alone again.