Chapter Text
The sound of shattering glass echoed through the den of their home in flat, lonely tones accompanied by the clatter of shards spilling across the floor. It was the ninth piece of glass that Jinx had broken in an hour. The glass was garbage taken from scavenge-piles near the border of Piltover and Zaun, and they had boxes of the stuff for a good reason.
“It’s okay, Jinx, let’s try again,” Lux said, handing her another piece of colored glass. “Open your fingers first.”
Licking her lips, Jinx furrowed her brow and focused, forcing the metal fingers of her arm to uncurl.
They obeyed slowly, and with uneasy, jerking motions. They didn’t open in time with each other like her old hand. Her crushed hand. It was a good hand, all things considered. This hand? Not so good. Whenever she stopped focusing on one finger, it stopped moving right. Focusing on all of them at once seemed like the simple solution but…
But it didn’t work like that.
For some reason, it just didn’t work like that.
Her arm barely moved, and Jinx couldn’t figure out why! She’d gone over it with a fine-tooth comb—a really nice one too—and it was put together fine. The systems were…weird, but Viktor was a weirdo on a good day, and that was saying something coming from her. But they all worked.
So why didn’t the arm work?
Blowing out a breath, Jinx leaned back in her desk chair and focused until her fingers were splayed. Then, with an effort that felt like trying to push Piltover itself into Zaun, mentally pushed until she had her arm hanging out halfway between herself and Lux who was sitting on the couch.
“Good,” Lux said, smiling. “Okay,” she set the glass shard in her palm, “now just take the shard from me carefully, go as slow as you need to.”
“Hate going slow,” Jinx muttered.
“I know,” Lux replied. “But you’ve got to get used to the way the hand moves now, and it’s not going to happen overnight.”
“I know that!”
Lux startled as Jinx’s hand snapped closed around the glass fragment so hard that it crushed most of it to dust, and Jinx stared at the mess in horror before looking up to Lux who had gone pale.
“I…I’m sorry, Blondie,” Jinx sobbed. “I d-didnt mean to!”
“It’s okay.” Lux brushed the glass dust from her fingers and reached out to caress Jinx’s cheek. “I promise it’s okay, you’re just frustrated, that’s all. I know this is hard.”
“Take it off!” Jinx sobbed as she held out her arm. “J-Just take it off.”
Lux didn’t argue. Carefully, Lux worked at the mechanism on Jinx’s shoulder. It was almost impossible for Jinx to take it off herself. Her real arm didn’t quite want to stretch like that. Oh, she could manage it, but it was like trying to wrestle with a dumpster eel that was glued to her shoulder.
In comparison, it only took Lux a few seconds to detach all of the links.
“We should build a cover or pauldron for your shoulder,” Lux said idly. “Too many of these links are exposed.”
Jinx didn’t reply, she just nodded dully as Lux brushed the attachments clear, quietly whispered ‘deep breath’ and then pulled the arm free with an electrical snap.
Pain sparked through Jinx’s chest and shoulder, and she clenched her jaw tight as she rode it out. Part of her wondered if she would ever get used to that, but the rest of her was pretty sure that the answer was ‘no’. That was the pain of her nerves disconnecting—or reconnecting when it went back on—and that kind of pain didn’t really dull.
“Okay, it’s off, let me get the cap for the port,” Lux said.
Another slow nod. Jinx waited and stared at her disembodied arm while Lux fished around in the box of supplies that Viktor had sent them home with. It was strange seeing it just…sitting there. Surreal, really. It was supposed to be a piece of her, but it wasn’t.
It was wrong. It didn’t work. It didn’t listen to her like she wanted it to. It didn’t do the things that she wanted it to do.
In fact, it seemed to take a kind of sadistic pleasure in doing the opposite. Every time she went to pick something up, it would knock it over. When she tried to grab something carefully it would break it. When she wanted to hit something it felt like she was swinging her arm through sludge!
“Here.” Lux was by her side with an oiled cloth, brushing the ports of the hub at implanted at her shoulder. “Remember to take care of this, okay? You don’t want to get dirt or grime in it.”
“I know, Blondie,” Jinx said quietly.
Lux sighed as she lowered the cloth and fit the cap, sealing the open ports. It had been five days since she’d woken up. Five days of trying to get her stupid arm to do what she wanted it to do.
All it did was taunt her.
“Hey—” Lux laid a hand on Jinx’s cheek and turned her until they were eye to eye— “you’ll get used to it, okay? It’s just going to take time.”
Jinx nodded sullenly as Lux pulled her to her feet. It was getting late and her head ached like she’d gone ten rounds with Vi (stands for Vicious). Just the act of getting that stupid arm to move five inches to the left made her skull throb. Getting it to do something ‘super complicated’ like pick up a piece of fucking glass was even worse.
She let Lux lead her over to the bed, shucked off her clothes in as lazy a fashion as possible, then flopped onto the mattress and pulled herself up to lay her head on the cool pillow before letting out a defeated groan.
“You need to relax,” Lux murmured as she moved over top of her, straddling the small of Jinx’s back as she settled her hands into tense shoulder muscles.
Closing her eyes, she tried to do as Lux said. It was easier when Lux told her to do it. It was even easier than that when Lux was touching her. And when Lux started singing? That was all the better. Jinx smiled as those soft, atonal notes started to drift out from above her while Lux kneaded away at the knots as she found them. She pushed deep, driving the heels of her palms into the beds of muscle hard enough that even Jinx could feel it.
While Lux worked, Jinx tried her best not to think. Thinking rarely got her anywhere good. Thoughts were overrated in Jinx’s opinion, especially since hers mostly consisted of things that would make Lux sad.
“Jinx, do you think something is wrong with the arm?” Lux started as she moved down Jinx’s back.
As much as she wanted the answer to be yes, Jinx shook her head. “S’not the arm, Blondie…s’me,” she slurred as she rested her face against the pillow. “M’too broken.”
Lux sighed, and Jinx could practically hear her shaking her head as she continued downward.
“Jinx, you…you know how I feel about you saying those things about yourself, right?” she asked, her voice gentle but firm.
A shudder ran through Jinx’s body as she pulled the pillow tight to herself, buried her face in it, and nodded. She knew. Of course she knew. Jinx knew because she knew that Lux loved her, even though, lately, Jinx was plagued by the worst and most terrible question of all in regards to that. It was a question that had never occurred to her before because her brain hadn’t been anywhere close enough to it to think to ask it. She’d never wondered it until recently, and Jinx couldn’t help but think that maybe that was a bad thing.
Maybe she had been better when she was really crazy.
At least then, she hadn’t wondered ‘why’.
Now, she did wonder it, though, and she hated that word with all her heart. She hated it more than she hated every Piltie in Piltover and more than the gas in the mines that choked her when she was a kid, and even more than that stupid, endless croaking that wouldn’t go away.
Lux finished working away at the muscles in her hips, then sat up and move back to straddle the small of her back again, and before Jinx could ask, she said, “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen…did you know that?”
Jinx frowned, then turned to look up at Lux with a weak smile tugging at the edges of her rictus.
“Blondie, c’mon,” she laughed raggedly. “I’m…I’m not, y’know…”
“No,” Lux said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what you aren’t, because I only know what you are, Jinx.”
Fingernails bit and dragged down her back, and Jinx hissed as the dull sensation pushed through the layer of numbness that made up her shattered body.
“I know that when I look at you, my heart breaks because you’re just that beautiful. I know that when I touch you I come undone because I can’t bear to mark your skin any more than it’s already been marked, and at the same time I can’t bear not to, because I need to know that you’re mine.”
Jinx bit her lip as Lux dragged nails down her back only to stop and reverse the motion.
“And you know that I can’t keep my hands off of you,” she continued, her voice growing warm and breathy as she leaned forward, draping herself across Jinx’s back and dragging her fingers up until they were digging into her shoulders.
Even numb as she was, she knew from the way that Lux was brushing her hair away from her neck that she was feathering kisses along her shoulders and up the column of her spine. Every so often those invisible kisses would be punctuated by a dull jolt of sensation as Lux dug her teeth into Jinx’s cold, scarred skin.
“B-Blondie, I…”
Her hand drifted to the hard, metal cap covering the stump of her left arm. Lux intercepted her, capturing her hand and pinning it to the mattress as she let her weight settle more heavily onto Jinx.
“Tell me now—” Lux’s voice had pitched to a deadly, razor’s edge at her ear— “if you really think your missing arm matters to me.” Her words cracked as she dug her fingers into Jinx’s back again. “Tell me, because if you do, then I must have done something truly awful for you think I would be so shallow.”
“M’sorry, Blondie,” Jinx rasped.
Lux shook her head, then brushed the hair away from Jinx’s face to lay kisses along her cheeks and at the edge of her lips as her hands slid up the length of Jinx’s arm to twine their fingers together. Her other hand brushed down Jinx’s left shoulder and over the metal cap as she nuzzled close to Jinx.
“Has there ever been a scar of yours I haven’t been desperate to kiss?” Lux whispered.
A moment ago, Jinx’s heart had been beating like thunder in her chest, and that ugly, static-wash knot of hisses and croaks had been chewing on her brain, and now it was finally growing silent. Before Lux, Jinx would have had to burn a building to quiet those voices down. Now, she could just close her eyes and breathe them out, because Lux was in her head too. She whispered and scratched and clawed, she bit deep and drew out the bad blood like venom from a wound, and replaced it with good things. Good whispers. Good feelings.
“Turn over,” Lux said.
She lifted herself up enough for Jinx to obey, and a moment later Jinx was on her back and staring up at Lux, watching as she hooked her fingers under the loose tunic she wore to bed to pull it off, leaving herself naked and Jinx’s mouth completely dry.
“Look at me,” Lux said quietly, and she reached for Jinx’s hand again and pulled it up and over her heart. “Do you feel that?”
Jinx nodded. Even through waves of numbness, she felt the thump-thump-thump of Lux’s heart beating a rapid, desperate tattoo against her ribs.
“You do that to me every time I look at you,” Lux said softly.
Before Jinx could say anything, Lux dragged her hand down, past her perfect breasts, along the toned plane of her stomach, past her waist, and Jinx stiffened as her fingers brushed across wet, silky heat.
“Do you feel that?” Lux asked, and Jinx nodded frantically.
She very much felt that.
“You do that to me, too, every time you touch me…every time you look at me and every time you kiss me, and hold me, and tell me ‘I love you’. ” Her voice fluttered over their gutlau promise, and Jinx nodded to each word.
“I love you,” Jinx said.
A shiver ran through Lux, and she bit her lip as she drew in a shaky breath. Her cheeks were flushed and there was a heat to her eyes that captivated Jinx in a way nothing else could. It was like watching dawn explode over the horizon over and over. Like watching a spire tumble from the skies to the earth in sheets of flame. The way the wan evening light flickered off of Lux’s hair sang starlight songs in Jinx’s ears and chased away the hate and whispers and toxtoad croaks.
Slowly, Lux began to roll her hips, grinding against Jinx. She was warm and wet and her voice pitched to high, breathless gasps as she rode Jinx with agonizing patience. Jinx started to shake as everything in her mind clouded over with the feeling of Lux taking her on their bed, and she welcomed it.
She was so, so tired of thinking.
“Do you feel that?” Lux whimpered as she shifted around until their legs were coiled together and her core was flush to Jinx’s. “Oh f—Jinx! I…Do you feel how much I n-need you?”
Not trusting herself to speak, Jinx nodded wildly, sending her long hair tumbling as their hips rolled and met again and again. Lux had a firm hold on her hand and used it like a lever. More pressure brought more sound, more sensation, and more song to drown out the static in Jinx’s head.
“J-Jinx, I…!” Lux gasped sharply, and a rush of wetness spilled between them.
Lux let out a sharp, feral growl as she lunged forward to wrap herself around Jinx, tangling their legs further until as much of her was touching as much of Jinx as she could possibly manage. Her lips crashed against Jinx’s, and her tongue didn’t so much probe for entry as demand it desperately. Jinx was just as desperate to give in, and she did.
Pinning Jinx’s hand above her head, Lux rode her roughly to another orgasm, one that Jinx tasted on her breath as she gasp and sighed her way through it.
It was enough to push Jinx over her own edge, although hers came less gracefully and more ragged. She came with a cry that was half of a gasp, and the other half a wrenching sob of relief. Lux carried her through it, lavishing her with kisses across her lips and her cheeks and brushed gently over her closed eyes and along the line of her jaw.
Silence descended slowly, disrupted only by their ragged breathing. Jinx freed her arm and wrapped it around Lux, pulling her close as Lux continued to press lazy kisses of whatever patch of skin she was closest to on Jinx.
“You have all of me, Jinx,” Lux whispered between kisses. “Wherever you go, you take me there, too.” Lolling out her tongue she ran it up along the side of Jinx’s neck, then said, “Go mad, and I’ll go there with you. Die, and I’ll make a funeral pyre of the city for you before lying down at your side…but you have me, now and forever, in every single dream.”
Jinx nodded as she carded her fingers through blonde hair, and she buried her nose in those soft locks that were rich with the scent of sweat and love.
“That’s my girl,” Jinx muttered back, and Lux nodded.
“Always,” she replied breathily. “Always and always.”
Turning her head, she caught Lux’s lips in a hard kiss that made Lux shiver in her arms. When they parted, there was a light to those blue, blue eyes of hers. Something bright and mad and beautiful.
“Tell me you’d kill to make me smile?” Lux asked gently.
“Point a finger, I’ll pull the trigger, Blondie.”
“Anyone?”
Jinx chuckled sleepily, raised an eyebrow, and said, “Everyone.”
Another shiver ran through Lux as she leaned in, ran her tongue across Jinx’s neck again before fixing her teeth onto the skin and biting hard enough to mark.
Closing her eyes, Jinx sank into the feeling and held her close as she drifted into the blackness of sleep on a bed of promises of fire and death and destruction rampant, and her lips stretched to a smile that was met by feathered kisses.
Arm or not, she was the luckiest girl in the world.