Chapter Text
Jinx bit and bit, the coppery taste of blood filling her mouth along with the tears in her eyes. She was sick, wrong, defective, broken. The walls crowded in around her as she rocked backwards and forwards.
She was certain she had taken her medication this morning, the little plastic pill box had an empty chamber after all. But here she was, surrounded by the swirling phantoms of her own cracked mind, struggling to maintain even a semblance of control.
”I need it.”
”You can’t, you promised Vi.”
”I need it.”
The thoughts were relentless, the visions of her dead siblings swirling around her in her mind.
”She still thinks you were in the passenger seat…” Mylo’s voice was thick and syrupy through the blood. ”Would she still love you if she knew?”
Jinx tried desperately to recall the words her therapist had said to her, she knew that things were wrong, that her thinking was disordered, but she just felt so lost in herself. She switched to her other thumb, the blood she had worried out of her left hand running freely. She didn’t have any drugs in the house, at least, nothing recreational. And her evening dose wasn’t the fun kind of drugs, and the one precious little pink pill in there that could be, she was going to need for this evening.
But she was just so desperate… she could go out, find something, even without money she had ways to get things she needed.
It’d be so easy. Claggor wormed in her mind, his decapitated phantom wrapped around her brainstem. He was always the one that encouraged her towards more chemical solutions, he had been responsible for her first joint after all, back when she was altogether too young.
She shook off the thoughts as best she could, desperation clouding her judgement. We all replace one addiction with another after all, as her uncle Silco used to say. Used to… back when he was still alive.
”Just another casualty of being too close to you.” the gurgling vileness of Mylo’s voice drumming in her ears as she rocked back and forth on her bed. She stood suddenly, waving the phantoms off and pressing the palms of her hands to her temples to try and maintain control. It had all gotten so much harder since… since the accident, the accident that had taken her adoptive father from her and landed her living in this tiny flat with her sister.
Her sister, Vi, her only reason for living, and the light in her life.
Vi was also some of the reason Jinx was even having thoughts about why she was still alive, without her Jinx was certain that she would have left this mortal coil already. But with her? With her she was wracked with guilt at every waking moment, guilty that she loved her all wrong, guilty that she had replaced one addiction with another.
Jinx let herself into Vi’s room, a space she knew would be locked if Vi ever found out her secret and made her way to the side table. As usual Vi had kept a small packet of plasters in the top drawer, just for her, and Jinx sat on the side of the bed plastering her fingers, doing everything she could to erase the evidence of the damage of her teeth. Today was a bad mental health day; It seemed, the worst point of winter, deep in January, the world was one of darkness and freezing cold wetness, and everything was so much worse.
She truly was a curse, a Jinx, and perhaps worse a degenerate. Vi had made it clear to her that certain things were off the table if Jinx wanted to keep living with her. She wasn’t allowed to hurt herself, no matter how bad the voices got, knives and razors were off the table. Jinx wasn’t sure exactly what would happen if she broke that particular rule, but even the thought of Vi leaving her, of her dumping her back into the system was enough of a threat to chill her urges, even in her worst attacks. She was also forbidden from taking drugs outside of the schedule Vi had created with her doctor, and from drinking alcohol without someone else in the room, usually Vi.
So far she had been good, and three months into their living arrangement things had reached something of a normal state, well, as normal as living with your clinically insane sister ever got. Not that Vi was completely level herself, her seven years of incarceration leaving her with her own quirks and the occasional night terror that caused Jinx to come running every time. But those hiccups aside they had almost reached a degree of normalcy. Vi went out to work and Jinx slept the morning away, whilst her sister skulked in the shadows, dug through trash or waited in a bush with a camera depending on which manner of task she had been given that day by her ‘partner’ Caitlyn. Eventually Caitlyn would let her off the leash long enough for her to come home to check on Jinx at lunchtime, then back to work until the evening.
Ah Caitlyn, Caitlyn was a perennial thorn in Jinx’s eye, and a person who she tried her very best not to think about at the best of times, and doubly so when she was on the edge of a psychotic breakdown. For now she put the sleazy lawyer as far from her mind as she possibly could, thinking about the junior district attorney would, at best, lead to her finding creative ways to circumvent Vi’s ‘no hurting yourself’ rule. She had, Jinx had to grudgingly admit, gotten her sister out of prison and managed to reunite them both. She had also had the gall to be extremely pretty and very openly gay.
This should, if Jinx was a normal person, not be an issue.
If Jinx was normal, then her sister, her wonderful, amazing and phenomenally sexy older sister absolutely should be allowed to flirt with whatever pretty girl caught her eye.
But Jinx was not normal. No, Jinx was far from normal, and she was also terrified. Terrified that one day Vi would find out the extent of her sick desires, or of her less savoury proclivities and she would, quite rightly, throw her away. That would be the end of her life she knew. Jinx wasn’t sure exactly when she had made peace with the morbid nature of her co-dependent life, the absolute certainty in her mind that she had an expiry date and that it was more likely sooner rather than later. It had probably been some time around week three, some time around her first… slip.
The first violation of her sister's trust, and the beginning of her descent into further madness. She sniffed, wiping a tear away with the back of her hand as she reached for Vi’s laptop, already laying herself prone on the bed.
>=========<3========<
TWO MONTHS EARLIER
Vi apartment wasn’t exactly quiet, it was still an apartment after all, even if it was a fairly nice one, over a thrift shop, with nice soundproofing. The neighbors in particular were strangely lovely, which Jinx hadn’t expected, always ready with an apologetic smile and a willing ear if she had any kind of mundane troubles. Apparently they had gotten used to Vi’s occasional nocturnal screams, and adding an extra crazy girl to the mix hadn’t seemed too onerous to them, even if Jinx’s particular flavour of crazy was a lot more ‘yells to herself in the middle of the day’. She had gotten the impression from talking to them that they thought Vi was a fancy lawyer, what with her occasionally being picked up in super nice cars, and her expensive motorbike.
Jinx hadn’t corrected them, in a very real sense she was, at least as far as Jinx was concerned. She did half of Caitlyn's work for her after all, everything that was too much trouble, or too boring at any rate.
Even with the neighbors, thankfully out during the day, and the shop downstairs an incredibly faint background noise, the apartment was still quiet. No clocks, no water features, and no pets. Even the fridge was a modern fancy thing, with a nearly silent compressor that made no noise at all, not even when Jinx was laying half inside it, with her face pressed onto the metal plate covering the salad crisper to try and cure a panic attack. Sometimes the silence was her friend, a blessed reprieve especially compared to the loud cacophonous halls of the institute where she had spent a good few years.
Sometimes however she realised that she needed the noise, and there was only so much time she could while away listening to music, painting or sculpting clay. The flat was already starting to fill up with an alarming number of small misshapen penguin creatures that Vi refused to let Jinx throw away.
So… Here she was, struggling with the voices on her own, in Vi’s bedroom, the walls alive with sharp angled colours and line art that was only real inside her own mind. It wasn’t even 3 in the afternoon, and Vi wouldn’t be back for at least four hours, if not five, not that Jinx knew precisely what she was doing today. Something about mystery shopping but also visiting pharma clinics. Today was a bad mental health day, and Jinx was desperate not to encroach more on Vi’s time, she had only had her job for a short while and Jinx was terrified of screwing it up for her by being too clingy and distracting.
She couldn’t take any Shimmer to make this all drift away on pink fluffy clouds, Vi had forbidden that.
She couldn’t cut herself, Vi had made sure that there were no knives in the apartment, and in any case she had sworn not to do that.
Her usual creative outlets were all fucked, she was too shaky, too disregulated to even think let alone shape clay, or put paint on a canvas.
So she was laying in bed, thinking about Vi and crying whilst smelling her pillow.
God she was pathetic.
All she could do was think about Vi, think about the evening together, about cooking with the single knife Vi would bring in from wherever it was kept outside. About cuddling up on the sofa and watching TV, the charming domesticity of the life she had always craved.
A home cooked meal, cuddles, and eventually, going to bed together.
The perfect home life, but Vi was not her girlfriend, Vi was her sister. Not hers to have, nor did she even want it, that would be disgusting after all. Like everything else in her short, pathetic life, it was an illusion. A facsimile of a life, provided only because Vi was obligated to do so as her sibling, a burden she bore due to their family ties. She knew the truth, that no-one would actually pick her, not given an alternative.
Her eyes fell to Vi’s laptop in the corner of the room, ostensibly locked so that she couldn’t access the internet without supervision. Vi was worried she would end up in some dark places again, and Jinx had agreed that she was probably correct. Still… She got up and went to the corner and picked up the laptop, sliding the airplane hard-lock in place before turning it on. With the laptop's wireless connection effectively switched off it was unlikely Vi would find out she had turned it on, her deft hands flying over the keyboard disabling the password effortlessly and sliding into Vi’s account.
She wanted to talk to Vi, to be held, to be close to her.
She wanted reassurance that she wasn’t going to be abandoned.
But right now, she would have to settle. So she would settle for whatever she could get, and right now that was logging on to Vi’s instagram, or as much of it as she could access without an internet connection. A few deft keystrokes and a couple of taps on the trackpad and she was staring at a cached version of Vi’s insta page from that morning. All of Vi’s private thoughts and her photos, right at Jinx’s fingertips, and conveniently without any ads.
She clicked play on one of the gifs that Vi had uploaded that morning, showing off her curl technique in the mirror, Jinx could just about make out one of her own legs waving in the bedroom mirror. She had been laying on the bed, idly scrolling on Vi’s smart-phone, using some of her supervised screen time that morning to look at pictures of cute rabbits. It was a good memory.
Some of the fog receded, and the voices quieted a little as she remembered their morning.
She clicked through a few more captioned photos of Vi doing various casual things until the browser finally threw an error, reaching the end of what it had stored.
She sighed and flopped back on the bed staring at the ceiling again. She was desperately ignoring the phantoms in her mind, using almost every trick in the book not to engage, not to even acknowledge their existence.
”They’re not real.” She told herself, screwing her eyes shut. Groaning audibly, Jinx grabbed Vi’s pillow and smothered herself with it, blocking out all of the sights and sounds of the room, filling her nose and face with the sensation of Vi. Closeness.
She had one final trick to play to get the phantoms to leave her alone, to reset her fractious brain chemistry, or occasionally to unbalance it even further depending on the day. Frustrated, she kicked off her shorts and wedged a hand between her legs and began resentfully rubbing herself. A good climax or two would, naturally, chase the shadows away at least for a while. Jinx and her hand were old friends, and usually more cooperative than this.
She ran her fingers across herself, her shaking hands offering thin pleasure, as her mind failed to conjure anything useful for her to work with. None of her usual standby dream lovers were showing up in any detail, everyone thin and insubstantial in her internal theatre. Jinx groaned in frustration as she remained dry as the proverbial desert, her body failing to flush or react in spite of it having been a solid day since she last took care of business.
Perhaps it was because she was in Vi’s room.
She shouldn’t really be here after all, especially not doing something so dirty as touching herself.
That… had an effect. She felt herself warming up a little, her body reacting to the tantalizing thoughts of the forbidden, even as she tried to tamp down on letting her mind wander in any more dangerous directions. Jinx huffed, rolling over towards the laptop, slapping it out of sleep mode with her more clean hand. Was Vi the kind of girl to watch her porn in incognito mode? Was Jinx desperate enough to find out?
She probably should have taken a bit more time to think about things, maybe after a cold shower, but in her addled state she was desperate for relief. And, with no drugs, no alcohol and no even less salubrious methods of calming the biting sensation at the edge of her brain sex would have to do.
She checked the browser history, anything after midnight, she frustratedly paged back a few weeks… nothing, nothing, nothing… oh. Oh ho ho.
Jinx recognised the URL vaguely, one of the super queer porn sites with all of the independent camera girls and reams upon reams of amateur content, all geared towards a less masculine gaze. The cache file was tiny, a low res pixel window clip for the thumbnail.
The first thing Jinx noticed, aside from how devastatingly pretty the young oiled up woman was, happened to be her hair. It was a light purple, almost blue, although she had not apparently bothered to match her pubes to the hair colour, the thin wispy blonde a strange counterpart. She was also, Jinx noted, really very skinny, a ballerina’s body, with a set of perky B cups. The sheer forbidden eroticism of what she was doing hit Jinx like a freight train with broken brakes driven by an escaped bank robber.
She was so very alive, with electrical sparks of sensation running across every inch of her as she desperately toyed with herself, her eyes glued to the pixelated image as the gorgeous young woman danced and writhed around the pole, stopping occasionally to dip a spare hand into her snatch for the amusement of her phantom audience. Her performance was mesmerizing and Jinx bit the sheets reflexively, trying to slow her orgasm, its lightning flash coiling in her belly, her abdominal muscles spasming desperately. The telltale sense of tightness around her lungs, the flash of heat across her face as lances of lightning pleasure shot up her spine and threatened to overwhelm all control over her body signalled the point she really should have stopped some time ago. As it was, she wasn’t sure she would be able to, so the hell with it.
Jinx let herself come, and hard, face down in Vi’s bed the clip playing over and over in her mind, but now with the added frisson of the mental image of Vi, a hand down her pants, hunched in the dark working herself furiously. Jinx moaned unashamedly at the image, the realisation that she had just had one of the hardest orgasms of her life, fucking herself to her own sisters porn.
And now she could not get the image out of her mind, and the eerie similarities between her and the actress were setting off a number of very illicit klaxons in her mind. Jinx stretched and luxuriated in the bed, already feeling herself rolling up for another round, in spite of how strong her last orgasm was. Her hands caught on something under the pillow.
Vi’s boxer briefs, the skin tight lycra bodyshorts, tangled in her tank top.
Had Vi been wearing these watching the video? Had she been slipping a hand inside the delightfully tactile silky material whilst touching herself to the woman in the video?
Had she been imagining the woman was Jinx?
Jinx had the shorts in her hand, two fingers pumping in and out of herself, absolutely lost in a world of demented need as she dirited the fantasy, more and more she revelled in the depth of the filth. She would absolutely regret it after, but right now, it was chasing all of the spiders from her brain, the overwhelming breathtaking ice cold electricity of the forbidden almost as good as Shimmer.
Jinx crossed a line.
She brought the shorts to her nose and sniffed, really breathed in the scent of Vi’s most intimate area, and for a moment, allowed herself to imagine being that woman in the video for her sister. The results were immediate and cataclysmic, her body wracked with shuddering pleasure as her brain practically whited out in the strength of her second orgasm, the first having almost been nothing but foreplay for the second. Jinx touched, and writhed and rocked her hips into her hands, both hands now, even as she realised she was rubbing the briefs into her crotch, mixing their essences together.
Eventually she subsided, her arms and legs flopping spent at her sides, the sense of over oxygenated tingling taking over all of her other considerations. She stared at the ceiling, feeling the post orgasm clarity slip in.
What had she done?
God she was sick.
And now Vi’s bed was wet with her arousal, a small damp patch under her butt.
She wanted to laugh, to cry, to burst into tears, and to be sick. Possibly all at once, but she couldn’t argue with the results. She was, absolutely, emotionally regulated again. Fully back under control, back in the driving seat again as it were. The foggy spidery sensation that she had long ago learned to recognise as indicative of a psychosis episode was crawling away, replaced with a heavy shame and guilt.
Of course Vi hadn’t been imagining the porn star was her, the idea was preposterous. It was a coincidence, nothing more. And now she had a hell of a mess to clean up, and had to invent an excuse as to why she had changed Vi’s sheets, when she wasn’t even meant to be in her room really. Well, not that Vi had ever said she couldn’t be, honestly it hadn’t come up.
Jinx resolved to ask permission when Vi got home.
She was sure she could behave herself in future, put this whole sad sorry thing behind her and go back to being a nice, normal, properly medicated little sister, playing at happy families again.