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There were two killers stalking her.
Jinx could feel them even if she hadn’t seen them. One was a murderer, and they probably thought they were sneaky, always staying out of sight, but Jinx knew they were there. They weren’t sneaky. They had murder in their eyes and when they looked at her while she was outside she could feel the cold steel inside them like a blade whispering free of an oiled sheath.
That one was easy. She would find them and kill them eventually.
The second one wasn’t so easy. The first one was just a murderer, but the second was a dream. Or a memory. Maybe a reminder. Whatever it was it sat in the back of Jinx’s mind like a venomous toad, fat and heavy, croaking until it was all she could hear.
Jinx sat up in bed in the low light of the Piltover morning. It was freezing outside, so it was freezing inside too. Jinx was vaguely aware of it in the same way she was aware of the blankets covering her to her waist.
The chill chewed at the edges of her dulled senses; at the skin of her bare arms and chest, and few places along her neck and back that still hadn’t been torn and ripped by chemburns or blades.
But it was all drowned out by the croaking.
It was a loud, guttural sound, like RROT, RROT, RROT. Every croak dragged out the first letter with a sound like a plague victim losing their guts for the last time.
RROT, RROT, RROT~
It was an ugly reminder of her own ruin.
RROT, RROT, RROT~
Jinx raised her right arm. It was harder than it should have been. Her muscles screamed. Her joints protested. Everything hurt.
But then, everything always hurt.
She didn’t want to tell Lux that. Bad enough Lux knew she couldn’t taste and could barely feel things. Jinx hoped that she wouldn’t ask. She promised not to lie to Lux, so she’d tell Lux if she did ask, but she didn’t want to.
If she did, then Lux might cry again and Lux should never have to cry.
RROT, RROT, RROT~
The toad was always loudest when it was quiet. Its groaning croak told her she was going to die, and worse, it told her she should. Jinx hated it. Dying meant stopping. Stopping meant silence.
Jinx hated silence.
RROT, RROT, RROT~
Except lately, the silence wasn’t so bad, because lately, it wasn’t completely silent. Today, as it had been for the past month and more, it wasn’t truly silent because it was disrupted by the faint susurration of breathing.
Lux’s breathing.
Somehow, despite how soft it was, it was usually louder than the stupid toad in her head.
Blink. Remember to blink.
Jinx forced her eyes closed, then open, and she turned her head as she did. The muscles in her back and neck complained, but she ignored them in favor of looking at Lux.
She was lying on her side, her right arm tucked beneath her pillow and her bare back to Jinx. Her left arm was above the blankets, her fingers twitched in unsteady dreams. Gooseflesh rose along her pale skin, reacting to the cold the way Jinx’s no longer did, and on impulse, Jinx reached out to touch her.
Ask-Ask-Ask-Ask
The demand in her mind hammered at the walls of her will. There was a strange, crippling apprehension in Jinx that touching Lux without asking first was some kind of sin.
A sin for something broken to touch something complete.
Something whole.
Something holy.
For once, she ignored the demand, though, and laid her hand on Lux’s arm. Her dulled senses found the warmth and softness underneath her palm, and Jinx relished it. She told herself it was okay. That Lux had told her it was okay. Lux wanted Jinx to touch her, she wanted Jinx to be okay with touching her.
Jinx wasn’t okay.
Lux was perfect; her fair skin was unblemished, and her hair fell in a pool of gold around her head, and Jinx moved her hand up Lux’s arm and across her shoulder to weave her fingers in those soft gold strands.
Once, when she was very small, Jinx had sat on a street corner and begged for scraps—a risky business in Zaun, but it was all she was capable of at the time. She remembered listening, as she begged, to a street performer, an old woman with only a few of teeth left and hextech cybernetic legs that were mostly rust and had long since stopped working. The woman was telling a story, Jinx recalled. It was a fairy tale about a girl who told a king that she could spin straw into gold, and Jinx had thought it was very silly at the time.
She didn’t think it was silly anymore because now she wondered if Lux’s hair was just straw that someone had spun into gold. Maybe Lux did it. It seemed like something Lux could do.
After all, Lux could do anything because she was perfect.
Jinx shuddered as an electric ache twisted her insides. She so rarely slept because of the pain, but that was okay. She didn’t need more than a handful of hours every couple of days. Normally, she would be up and about either tinkering with something or running through the city causing havoc, but not now.
All of that felt less important than lying in bed next to Lux. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t sleep, it mattered that she was near Lux, because Lux made everything better.
Because Lux was perfect.
“Found you,” Jinx whispered, and a small, creaky reflexive cackle escaped her lips. “I chased you and I found you and then you were ‘It’, and then you found me, and I was ‘It’, and now…”
Jinx trailed off, unsure of where to go next. Was she still ‘It’? Was Lux ‘It’? Who was seeking and who was hiding? Who needed to be found? Or… Or was the game over? If the game was over, then that meant she needed to find a new game, but a new game meant someone who wasn’t Lux and that… that didn’t sound like a fun game.
Nothing without Lux sounded any fun anymore.
RROT, RROT, RROT~
Jinx furrowed her brow as the croaking got louder, got deafening. She hated that noise. It was the worst noise. All fat and sickly-sounding. It sounded like drowning in a sump.
Drowning…
Something about that tickled the back of her mind, something ugly and nasty and mean. A memory, Jinx thought. A bad memory. She had so many bad memories of bad places. It was easier to make noise and beat the memories back. Nothing was louder than a collapsing spire, not even memories, but she didn’t have anything to beat them back right now.
Not even Lux’s breathing was quite loud enough. Almost, but not quite.
RROT, RROT, RROT~
‘Promise you’ll tell me if it’s too much.’
She’d promised, but she didn’t know what the promise meant. What was too much? Was it just for the night? Was it forever? When did a thing become too much? Was it when she wanted to make the noise stop so badly she would bash her head into the wall just to get it to stop? Was it when she stared at one of her grenades for long enough that she wondered what would happen if she just pulled the pin and let it go bang right there in her hand?
Was it—
“—too much,” Jinx muttered. “It’s too much.”
Jinx grit her teeth, forcing herself to obey her promise as she set her hand on Lux’s shoulder and gave her a gentle shake.
“Mm?” Lux turned over, blinking sleep from her eyes as she looked up at Jinx. Her eyes were so blue. They were so good. Blue is the good color. It’s the color of clean air. The color of clean water. “Jinx? What is it?”
She didn’t know how to answer that. What is ‘it’? Who is ‘It’? Jinx didn’t know so she couldn’t answer.
“Are you okay?”
Jinx shook her head. No, she wasn’t okay. It was too much, it was too—RROT, RROT, RROT—much and she didn’t know how to make the noise stop anymore.
“It’s too much, Blondie,” Jinx said, and her voice creaked.
“What?” Lux sat up, the blankets falling from her naked body as she shifted closer to Jinx.
Her nose scrunched up a little when she was concerned. Jinx thought it was cute. It would be a lot cuter if it didn’t mean she was worried. Lux shouldn’t have to be worried. Nothing bad should ever happen to Lux. Never ever.
“I promised to tell you if it was too much,” Jinx said quietly, trying to organize her thoughts but finding it harder because of all of the—RROT, RROT, RROT—noise.
She hung her head, threading her fingers through her hair as she gripped her temples tightly, trying to keep the pressure from building, but she couldn’t. Jinx couldn’t keep her head from—RROT, RROT, RROT—screaming. It was too loud and too much and that meant she had to tell Lux because she promised she would.
“Jinx, please talk to me?” Lux whispered shakily. She sounded scared. That’s bad. That’s a bad thing, and bad things shouldn’t happen to Lux. Jinx needed to make the bad thing stop, and Lux wanted her to talk so—
“I drowned when I was little,” Jinx said, the words falling out as the memory erupted, croak after croak, from that ugly toad in her head.
Lux stared for a moment (blue, blue eyes) “Wha… y-you drowned?”
Jinx nodded.
“When I was little, I fell in a half-drained sump. It was three meters down, and two meters deep. I couldn’t reach the bottom. I was too little. I couldn’t get out… I was too little. So I kicked and screamed, I tried to float… the water burned my skin, and tasted awful.” Jinx shuddered as the memory crawled out of her like a venomous slug. “Nobody came. I was there for hours, but I was getting tired. I was so tired. I was sinking, and the whole time, for all those hours, there was a toxtoad on a scumpile nearby… thick, flat, jelly-bellied things the color of sick… and it was croaking.”
Jinx clutched her head tightly and started to shake.
“It croaked and croaked and croaked, and every second I slipped deeper into the sump, further into the pool until I was under it and my limbs burned and my lungs burned and my skin burned and I was drowning, and it just kept croaking.”
Jinx turned her eyes to Lux. She looked horrified. Her eyes were wide and filled with tears, and her hand was covering her mouth. She should stop. Jinx wanted to stop. She wanted to make the tears go away because Lux shouldn’t cry. She shouldn’t frown or be sad, because Lux was perfect and good.
Blue eyes shouldn’t cry.
“How did you get out?” Lux whispered weakly. “Please… I need to know.”
Jinx bit down on the inside of her cheek. She didn’t want to keep talking, because Lux was crying, but Lux asked her to talk so—
“The drainage system autocycled,” Jinx answered flatly. “It sluiced the sump clear, dragging me with the inflow and spitting me out of a wastefall and into a sewer lake, I broke three ribs on the way down, and I had to crawl out of the lake spitting up sewage.”
Chance.
Pure chance.
The only reason that Jinx had survived was that she had lasted long enough for the automatic timer in the great drainage system that the sumps automatic machines were slaved to tick down and let her out. It was only the chaos of chance that had freed her.
“The toxtoad came with me down the sluice,” she continued, and a brittle cackle snapped out of her. “It was washed up on the shore beside me, just croaking and croaking while I laid there on my stomach, throwing up the stuff I’d swallowed and crying and burning and trying to scrape my skin clean.” Jinx ran her hands over her numb flesh. That hadn’t been the last time she’d taken an impromptu swim. “I was bleeding through my skin, and I just w-wanted to die, and the only sound I could hear was that croaking.”
RROT, RROT, RROT~
The toad wanted her dead. She was certain of it. Even now, after all these years, long after she’d pushed herself up off of the shore, trudged over to the toad, and stomped it into paste, Jinx was sure that the toad still wanted her dead. It was still there in the back of her mind, croaking and croaking, counting down with every ugly breath.
Lux looked equal parts terrified and confused, but only for a moment. After that moment passed, the terror was supplanted with warmth, the confusion, with determination, and her blue eyes (good eyes, clean eyes) fixed on Jinx firmly as she wrapped her arms around her and drew her down to the bed. She pulled Jinx close, letting her bury her face against Lux’s neck, and Jinx shook violently as she tried to breathe and fill her nose with a smell that wasn’t sumpstink and toadscum.
“It’s okay,” Lux murmured, petting Jinx’s head in long, calming strokes. “There’s no croaking here, it’s just me and you, and you’re home, and you’re safe.”
Was she safe? Safe meant nothing. Safe meant less than nothing. Safe meant Jinx felt safe which meant she felt vulnerable which meant she felt unsafe which meant—
“Sshh~” Lux pressed a kiss to the top of Jinx’s head as she continued her soft petting motions. “I love you.”
She said the words. Their words. The secret words that Jinx realized the night she thought Lux hated her. The night that the sun went out.
Lux’s gutlau was terrible, but Jinx would never tell her that. She would never tell Lux that when she spoke her gutlau it was with a Piltovan accent, and that she spoke it through her nose, and that it sounded snooty and squeaky.
All that mattered was that it sounded like Lux.
Jinx started to relax, and the—RROT, R—croaking started to get quieter.
“I love you so much, Jinx,” Lux said quietly. “You’re my whole world, okay? I love you, and if anything or anyone tries to hurt you, I’ll tear them apart with my bare hands, I promise.”
Jinx had said too many words. She didn’t have anymore, so she just nodded silently. She was tired. So tired. More tired than she remembered being in a long time. Her body ached, but Lux was warm and soft, and her kisses were gentle.
Maybe… maybe she would try to sleep.
“I’ve got you,” Lux murmured, cradling Jinx gently and stroking her hair. “I found you, and now you’re mine.”
Mine.
That’s right. Jinx wasn’t ‘It’. Lux wasn’t ‘It’ either. They were ‘Mine’. Lux was Jinx’s and Jinx was Lux’s.
Finally, Jinx smiled as she realized that she’d already found a new game. That they'd already started playing it, even. They’d finished their game of chase and their game of hide-and-seek. Now they were playing keep-away, and they were playing on a team. Lux and Jinx on one team, and on the other?
The rest of the world.
Jinx’s smile broadened until it split her face her to ear, and she snuggled into Lux’s embrace. Too bad for the world. Going up against the pair of them? How sad. The world should have brought more people.
Closing her eyes, Jinx drifted. She didn’t even notice when the toad stopped croaking.