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She’s sitting on the edge of Ekko’s bed when he walks in.
She hasn’t turned on his lamp and the dregs of dusky light coming in through his window cast her features into murky obscurity. Ekko stops, watches as her slender frame lists slightly to the side, propping herself up in a lazy lean against his mattress. She’s got one of his sketchbooks open in her lap, the fingers of her free hand splayed out over a page as though she’d been running her hands across it. Ekko catches a flash of Vi’s red hair on the open page before she flips it shut and looks up at him.
Her hair is still short, but it’s growing out fast. She’s tied it back into two braids that almost graze her shoulders, a cheeky imitation of her signature style. The bags under her eyes are faded, her cheeks look fuller. Her eyes twinkle with an ever-distinct sparkle of amusement.
“Hey,” she greets as casually as ever, and the grin she fixes him with is lopsided and teasing, full of that Jinx-specific brand of mischief that he adores and aches for in equal measure. Her voice sounds lighter than ever, like everything that had burdened her in life had manifested as a physical weight pressing down upon her throat and had now been lifted.
Ekko has had this hallucination—or one very much like it—too many times to count. The details are a bit different: she’s never had a new look before , Ekko notes. She’s suspended in time in his imagination, always Jinx or Powder as he’d known her in life. Perhaps the new appearance is a sign that he’s moving on, accepting that the past is gone. Or maybe it means he’s finally losing it. Either way, he is too tired to care.
Ekko slumps, his bag sliding off of his slack shoulders and dropping heavily to the floor. He steps over it, kicking off his boots and tossing his jacket aside as he makes for the bed. When he’s close enough, he turns and drops heavily down upon his mattress beside her, staring up at the ceiling and letting out a heavy sigh.
He doesn’t look at her. He’s afraid he might lose himself if he allows himself to imagine a happier, healthier version of her, a Jinx that could have been. Ekko can’t keep himself from thinking of her, though. If he concentrates, he swears he can feel the warmth of her next to him, sense the dip in the bed where she’s sitting. The hallucinations never touch him, and he never reaches for them—but now he is struck by the blinding, nearly desperate urge to. It’s torment to keep his eyes up, his hands clasped tightly together and resting on his chest, when she feels so achingly real beside him.
“Hey,” he says belatedly, the word leaving him in a breathy exhale.
There’s a moment of silence. Then Jinx eases herself down beside him, turning on her side. He swears he can feel the bed dip and shift as she moves; he nearly flinches when the back of her hand almost grazes against his arm for one heart-stopping moment. He squeezes his eyes shut, forces himself to breathe, reminds himself of the truth: This isn’t real. She’s gone. You’re imagining things because you want them to be true.
When he opens his eyes again, she’s stopped shifting and has settled down beside him. Her head is pillowed in her hands, her body a scant few inches from his own. Ekko’s gaze snaps back to the ceiling before he can stare too much and she huffs out a laugh that makes him twitch, inexplicable heat rising to his cheeks. Ekko drags a hand down his face and groans—he’s blushing over literal figments of his imagination now. Fantastic.
“Gonna be honest, I was expecting a bigger reaction from you, wonder boy,” Jinx teases, though she doesn’t sound particularly offended. Ekko drinks in the sound of her voice and feels some of the day’s tension drain out of him. He relaxes despite himself, lulled by the sound of her voice. He's sinking deeper into the mattress, his eyes fluttering shut. “You’ve got a nice place here, though. What’s wrong? Bad day?”
“Just long,” Ekko tells her with a heavy sigh, because why not? He’ll never really get to hear her speak again; he may as well indulge himself while he still remembers what she sounds like. They never got the chance to talk like this, to discuss the small things. There was always something bigger to worry about, some end-of-the-world catastrophe creeping up behind them. It’s nice to imagine her asking about his day, even if it’s mostly teasing. It’s nice to think of what their life might have looked like in the aftermath of everything.
“There’s just so much to do ,” Ekko continues, trying not to sound as exhausted as he feels. “It’s good, though. I’m keeping busy. Everyone’s rebuilding. But…”
“But you miss me.” Jinx drawls.
Ekko opens his eyes and turns on his side to look into her face. She’s grinning—her eyes are crinkled at the corners with obvious amusement—but there’s a little furrow to her brow that speaks to something deeper, too. It takes Ekko a moment to realize that she looks concerned. He’d so rarely seen her like that in life that it’s almost hard to imagine her worried for anything, let alone him.
His expression softens. She looks different. Less troubled, maybe. Healthier. Fuller. Happier .
When he speaks, he can hardly raise his voice above a whisper. “I do,” he admits, finally allowing himself to take her in without shame. His eyes flicker over her face, drinking in the curve of her smile, the brightness of her eyes. “I wanted you to have this, too. I wanted to do it together. It could have been good. We could have been really, really good.”
She’s watching him carefully now, her lips pulling down into a frown. “I don’t know about that,” she says, and hums thoughtfully as her eyes flit over his face. “You’ve always been so good, Ekko. But me… I think I was ruined from the start. Damaged goods,” she jokes, and huffs out a humorless laugh.
“Don’t,” Ekko snaps. He feels heat burning behind his eyes despite himself, but he presses on, glaring at her through the wetness building up. “You’re not damaged, or ruined, or whatever else you want to call it. You were wronged, but you had the same capacity for good as anyone else. I can’t imagine what you would have been able to do if this place hadn’t—if I hadn’t failed you.” The guilt settles down upon him like a physical weight, pushing the breath from Ekko’s lungs. He lets out a gasping, keening whine, and manages to gasp out, “I failed you, and, now you’ll never get to see what it could have been like, and, and—fuck.”
Ekko presses the heels of his palms into his face and swallows back a sob. When it stops feeling like he’s going to break if he relaxes, Ekko lets his eyes flutter open against the heels of his palms and watches stars dance across the self-imposed darkness.
“...You didn’t fail me, Ekko.”
He drops his hands down and frowns at her, surprised to see that she is frowning right back. She looks hurt, almost afraid—as though she has no idea what to do with him, how to comfort him, but desperately wants to try.
“I did,” he insists. “I stopped believing in you. I started grieving the person you were while the person you had become was still alive. I could have done something if I had just tried. And now…” And now you’re gone, he doesn’t say, because it aches too much to say it aloud.
“Oh,” Jinx says, and lets out a sudden, surprised laugh. “You really think I’m dead, don’t you?”
The taunt makes Ekko flush yet again, because he is still embarrassingly flustered by Jinx’s teasing even when it’s his own mind conjuring up her slick smile and projecting it into the empty space beside him. Petulant, he replies, “you are. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen you here.”
“Oh?” Now she perks up, pushing onto her knees to leer down at him. Her knees are pressed deep into the mattress at his side, just a hair’s breadth away from brushing against his elbow, and she looms over him, grinning smugly. “You must’ve really had it bad if you’re dreaming about me,” she teased, then leaned back and fluttered her eyelashes mockingly. “Well? How do your dreams compare to the real thing?”
Ekko watches her wonderingly, blinking through the wetness beginning to well at the edges of his amber eyes once more. “Nothing compares to the real thing,” he murmurs, soft and undeniably fond.
Jinx’s grin slips, softens. She smiles almost gently as she leans back down, poised to speak, her hand sliding to rest over both of Ekko’s, and—
Ekko flings himself off of the bed with a startled yelp, rolling onto the floor and then leaping to his feet with frenzied, unfocused energy. The hallucination had just touched him. They’re not supposed to do that. He’s never had one touch him before.
The practical part of him wants to fall into a defensive stance because his brain is screaming that this is some freakish intruder wearing his childhood friend’s face as a costume. The emotional other half urges him to run forward and fling his arms around her, to pull her in and never let her go again.
Ekko settles for something in between, standing at the foot of the bed and flailing his arms uselessly. “ Jinx?” He asks, incredulous, gaping.
She fixes him with an unimpressed stare, rolls her shoulders in a lazy shrug. “I tried to tell you I wasn’t dead.”
A delirious, disbelieving laugh escapes him. Then Ekko is upon her, scrambling to close the gap and draw her in. He flings himself onto the mattress and throws his arms around her, his arms heavy over her shoulders, his face pressed hard into the side of her neck. There are fresh tears in his eyes once again, and he feels Jinx’s shoulders shake with soft laughter as he sniffles into her scarred skin. A long-fingered hand comes to rest at the nape of his neck, and the weight of it against his skin is undeniable. She’s cold to the touch and still much slighter than she should be, but she’s here, so close he can feel the puff of her breath against his ear, feel the rise and fall of her chest where it’s pressed against his own. She’s here and she’s laughing softly into his ear, one hand grazing comfortingly at the back of his neck while the other drapes itself loosely around his hips.
Still half-convinced that this is some cruel prank, Ekko draws back just enough to get a good look at her. Jinx doesn’t seem to mind; she grins right back at him, her eyes flashing blue in the near-complete darkness that has settled over the room, and Ekko shudders at the sight of it. How long has he dreamed of that smile? How many nights has he looked out at the city from his balcony and wished that there was something he could offer the world to see it again? And now she’s here as if it’s nothing. As if she’s only been out on vacation, as if he hadn’t written her name on a piece of paper and relinquished it to a flame.
It is a struggle for Ekko to loosen his grip on her when she feels so tangibly alive beneath his hands. He doesn’t dare let her go for fear that she might leave just as quickly as she’d come. He keeps his arms draped loosely over Jinx’s shoulders and she lets her hand slide down to his arm, holding him in place as though she craves this just as much as he does.
“ How?” He demands. “You—You were gone. You’ve been gone for a year.”
Jinx shrugs. “Got anything to eat? It’s kind of a long story.”
Understatement of the century, Ekko thinks, already nodding along to her question. He feels frenzied, flustered, out of control. Like a kid with a crush, only now the emotions are magnified a hundredfold by distance and absence and a desperate longing that has been eating him alive for a year. “I might have something downstairs,” he murmurs, distracted by the way she looks at him, her eyes full of a fondness he’s never seen from her before—not from his version, at least.
Jinx slides the hand resting on his hip forward just enough to hook a thumb through the loop of his belt and draw him closer, and Ekko’s mind goes blank. He thinks his knees might give out beneath him. Jinx tugs again and he gasps, stumbling closer, watching as she huffs out another soft, dreamy laugh.
“I missed you,” she says, an openness to her expression that nearly blinds Ekko with its brightness. She’s changed in the time that she’s been gone. She seems more comfortable, more at ease with herself. It suits her. Jinx has always been at her best uncontained; it had never suited her to wall herself off, to hide behind bombs and gadgets.
“I missed you too. So much.”
Ekko has changed, too. He wants to hear what she’s been up to, wants to show her everything he’s been a part of. They’ve accomplished so much in her absence, and he’s certain she’s done the same in theirs. He can only imagine what the two of them can accomplish together. They have time.