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“You ever wish you could stay in one moment?”
Of course, she wants to tell him after the weeks they've spent together. Months, decades even, but that's not as accurate this time, with this version of him.
Out and away from the heart of Zaun, her feet dangle off the concrete edge by the rusty, broken gate. She tries not to think about Violet too much, or how close yet far she can feel to another person at the same time. Too few words for too many emotions.
The lights inside dance to Gret's music inside The Last Drop. It echoes out onto the street with the outdoor speakers, only ever used during the Innovator's Competition to announce the brilliance of the undercity. “I still need to thank Claggor for fixing those speakers,” she says.
“He fixed them a while ago and they’re still standing. Did a great job.” He’s right; she’s forgotten just how long he’s been here, around her, around them. “I’ll have to ask him how he did it one day,” he lies.
“You could carry on his handiwork if he ever gets swept up to Piltover,” she lies back. He doesn’t know she knows. He probably thinks she’s being honest.
Time slows. She wants it to continue that way, to slip into that infinity between 0 and 1 where the opposite side of the binary never arrives. Stay in the moment forever. She never thought she would say that about a moment like this, with him.
Another song vibrates through the speakers. Another sensual dance beat, bodies beyond the windows dancing and swaying. She hums along, leans her head on his shoulder, reminding herself that the warmth radiating from him is still him, no matter what the circumstance.
“I promise I’ll never forget this,” he says. He sounds like he’s about to cry.
“You better not.”
He’s nostalgic, it’s in his eyes, and she wants to kiss him, but the way he pulls back from her when she leans in confirms too much. Here, with that tension in his shoulders, the jolt backwards—this is the part she wishes was a lie—not who he is, but how he feels. “Sorry, I…”
“It’s fine.”
“Can we just pretend like it’s the first time?” he asks. His voice betrays him, cracks in a way it hasn’t since they were much younger. His lip trembles, downturned, and all she wants to say is here, hey, look at me, just meet my eyes for a little while, please, stop being so afraid.
That last one is unfair; he hasn’t told her anything more than she needs to know. His fear always shows in the same way, and that’s what it all comes down to: different confirmations across time and space and place.
Every time she says she’s happy with the way things are—to herself, to Vander or her friends, even Violet, even the gods—no one, not even the universe, is able to give her that. So—fine. She can be a little selfish, to want this moment with someone that shouldn’t exist in this world. She can pretend like it’s the first time, again and again and again.
She reaches out for Ekko’s cheek, cups his jaw. A finger grazes over his earring and he finally looks at her with a gaze she knows across every one of his faces. He leans into her and she thinks of how this is another first for him. She kisses him, carefully, his soft lips and that one crooked tooth, and she holds him to her, just like that, for as long as she can.
This time it feels like a first for her, too.
§
The beginning of the Innovator’s Competition swings into full effect as evening settles and shops close up for the night. Neon lights flash over The Last Drop in succession, the colours in the gaseous tubes mingling from pinks and purples to various blues and yellows. Gret spins the newest vinyls from a local Zaunite musician, electro-pop colouring the crowd’s ears like the lights to their eyes. Powder moves through the throng of bodies and blinks and sees this version of him in front of her. She blinks and sees the boy she fell in love with—wait, not the same—but in a way, it is—but it’s not—
He sees her looking at him and his face lights up, eyes awestruck, and she throws any logic out the window. He walks towards her with a smile. As they dance, she can’t help herself. Please, she begs to whoever is listening. Please let this last a little longer.
§
A few days after the competition, she spends over an hour picking up the jagged fragments of the blue crystal that Ekko had pieces together. She slips it into a drawstring cloth bag, tucks it into her pocket. He had called it Hextech before, the foreign word slipping too easily from his lips on more than one occasion.
“This aftermath is…tough. It’s not like anything’s really changed,” Powder tells Doll Violet that day, whispering close to where an ear would be if she knew how to sew them on. She lays on her back and rests Violet on her chest as she tries to recount the events over the past few weeks. As time went on, that Ekko would sometimes visit Violet without Powder there—sweet, but odd. There were other signs, but that was a big one.
When she talks about the Hextech crystals, how determined he was to find shards in the cracks of crumbling concrete in the old wreckage, anger surges through her. “All these opportunities to include me in the real reason for those innovations, and he never thought to trust me. Hey Powder”—she switches to a different register—“I’m not even supposed to be here and I think I can make a wormhole to get home. Do you have any ideas?”
She places Violet back on the makeshift shrine and pulls the hidden drawer out, the bag of rough-cut crystals staring back at her. Only one gem still remains perfectly round. Small Lichtenberg fractures bloom where they lightly knock against each other. “You idiot,” she says to the gems, to the Ekko that’s no longer there. “I would have given you all of these.”
Back at home, she tucks the little bag under her pillow, inside her pillowcase. There’s no basis for what she’s doing, but maybe—maybe—she’ll—what? See something? Him? Her? Successfully transport herself to the correct timeline, potentially stuck in a foreign-familiar place like he was with her? She likes her life the way it is and has said as much to other people more times than she cares to count.
That Ekko had filled out a brand new notebook, leaf to leaf, while he was here. That might give her some information, some guideline…
No wormholes, she tells herself firmly. She doesn’t know what to expect by trying to create who-knows-what, but she knows what she wants to keep the same. Instead of taking the easy way out with the perfectly powerful pieces in the shrine, she’ll take her chances on the remaining fragments: still mildly energy-generating, untouched but near her person, significantly fewer fractures than the whole.
(And maybe nothing will come out of this, but that would be its own answer.)
§
Powder jolts awake, eyes blurry and out of focus. The numbers on her digital clock tell her it’s still too early to get up.
Ekko—her Ekko—groans from behind her. An arm snakes around her waist, gently nudging her to lean back against the pillow, against him. He kisses the base of her neck, her shoulder, her shoulder blade. “You’re okay,” he says, his morning voice heavy.
“Sorry.” Her voice is hoarse and foreign. “Weird dream.”
“Is it Vi?”
“Sort of,” she lies. She feels for the crystal fragments. A few pieces hum against her fingertips. She’s had a few dreams of her sister since the Innovator’s competition, and in many of them, she’s alive. It feels too real, but that image probably has to do with the mural of Older Violet that exists in her world now.
In this dream, there were unfamiliar bodies, an explosion, and a noticeably deep wound in Older Violet’s side. Someone near her was yelling for her to wake up, hang in there, while her eyelids fight to stay open. “I don’t remember anything else, though.”
“Mmm.” He nuzzles further into her bare back.
Powder rubs at her face once, twice. Ekko falls asleep again within the minute, and she tries to do the same.
§
It took a few months, almost a year, after Violet’s death for Powder to work herself up to the rooftop runs again. Mylo, to their group, had entertained stealing small things again—bread and fruits and a pair of socks off someone’s clothesline—but never followed through with it. Sometimes Powder would go alone, but she did it for the adrenaline rush and the warm sunlight mixed with the harbour’s breeze.
She can’t pinpoint when exactly Ekko joined her, but he only came along if she invited him, since “this is your thing, not ours,” as if it couldn’t be both. The first invite turned into three and into seven, and while she would still go on her rooftop runs alone, his company was always welcome.
One day, sometime after their first kiss during a nighttime run to look at the stars, Ekko jumped at Powder entering his room unannounced. (No contraption thrown at her head, but his stance was instantly on the offence.) He joins her that night, but up on the rooftops she notices Ekko a little unsteady on his feet. He followed her grounded movements more easily than other runs, and for the first few jumps, she waited on the other side as he worked himself up to them.
During a particularly difficult jump where he would need to ricochet off one of the walls, Ekko freezes. Powder, on the next roof one storey higher, looks down at him and his wide, scared doe eyes. “Come on,” she croons. “It’s not like you were ever scared of this one before!”
Ekko laughs nervously. “Not sure what happened,” he says back. “It feels—I’m trying to pretend like it’s the first time I’m doing this.”
“Well, your first time was unstoppable. You have a powerful jump.”
The wind dies down and she hears him talking, more to himself. “Powerful and unstoppable,” he says. He takes a few steps back, propels forward, and jumps.
§
Powder really didn’t think much of it at the time. No matter how happy they’ve become despite the hardships, none of them came out of that mission unscathed. Claggor still gets night terrors sometimes. Mylo, with all his expert lockpicking skills, will expose himself to different locks, attached to nothing but itself, but his hands still tremble around his tools.
Powder dreams of Violet most often looking like a ragdoll with lifeless eyes, not unlike how she looked that night.
“I know I never went on the mission, but it hurts being alone sometimes,” Powder’s Ekko told her once, months after Violet’s ceremony. “When the power cuts out and it goes quiet, or if I don’t hear from one of you for a long time, my mind wanders into the worst possibilities. I start to feel this—this weight.”
They were sitting up high, in the space between the broken gate, for the first time of many to come. It’s the same Violet used to take her. Mild weather. Ekko let out a shaky breath. “The weight is so heavy sometimes that I can’t breathe.”
He doesn’t need to tell her how guilty he feels, has felt, continues to feel. She sees it in the way he moves around her, still careful and calculated even though no one blames him for what happened.
“What about filling the silence with noise? Music—singing, humming. Fix yourself a dingy radiator or something.”
“Ha ha.” But when Powder looks at him, there’s a pathetic smile. “Sometimes the noise makes me even more nervous.”
§
Once, somewhere in the days that start blending together, her Ekko stays over and asks why the bag, why the blue crystals. “I’ve never seen those before.”
Powder doesn’t correct him; he’s seem them once, briefly, when they went on that mission together. Out loud, she says, “Found them on the street. Felt too pretty to leave them there.”
“Oh. Okay.” He doesn’t believe her. It’s not even a real answer. He doesn’t remember the weeks leading up to the competition, nor the competition itself, and Powder’s the only one that can explain. Reality might have returned faster than she expected, but she can’t keep living in that moment, no matter what she wishes or wants.
Powder sighs. “I’m sorry. There’s a lot I can’t explain, but they’re are important.”
Ekko’s face softens. He offers her a small smile. She thinks about the most recent recurring dream without Violet: the dancing, the lights, the kiss, the promise of a held memory. The spinning pendant, tucked into a pocket in the back of her journal because it’s one place she knows her Ekko will never touch.
“I trust you,” he says. He doesn’t bring it up again.
§
Though, now that she thinks about it, there’s no such thing as a first time, is there? She remembers the briefest flash of confusion from young Ekko to young Powder, not long after Violet died on that job. Some difficulty in processing the death and the cremation that she chalked up to a struggle in understanding his own grief.
When they were thirteen, Ekko suggested the shrine for Violet in Powder’s hideaway. The urn had stayed with her, in her bedroom at The Last Drop, for the longest time. “The last place she’d want to be,” he said, “is stuck in the back of Vander’s when she was always sneaking out.”
It took a two months to set up, but it was worth it: the various curtains sewn together to tent the actual shrine, a wooden drawer unit from Violet’s room that neither Powder nor Vander wanted to get rid of, and colourful little string lights. As Ekko adds the final touch of three throw pillows, found somewhere in Piltover, Powder looks at their combined efforts.
“So?” Ekko says, beaming. “What do you think?”
“Yes.” Colour everywhere, in the fort, the lights, the accessories. Even the incense had a pink tinge to it. “She would have hated me for leaving her in my bedroom.”
One day, fourteen-year-old Ekko woke up asking Vander for Violet. He said he didn’t know she died. Powder asked him if he wanted to visit the shrine to ground himself—she’s woken up with that untethered feeling before. He helped her make four copper-scrap violets to place in a little purple glass vase next to the urn.
Another time, at sixteen, Ekko painted a portrait of Violet. Powder keeps it next to the one she painted of her sister, the last smile of Violet’s she ever saw.
Even now, at nineteen, three weeks after he first showed up and on a day where Heimerdinger had to run a few errands, this Ekko had asked, “Who drew that photo of Vi?”
“I did,” Powder lied, but she’s sure Violet is supposed to be sixteen or seventeen in it, and she never made it to that age. Ekko nods. Something calculated went on behind those eyes, but he never questioned his own artistic hand.
§
This Ekko never questioned his own hand, but he did have the audacity to accuse her of killing her own sister. She wonders, even now, what happened in his world to make him think that. Despite it all, he still led her through a strange path—one hand over her eyes, another to the small of her back, guiding her—to the ancient tree within the pipes. It grows on top of this worn stone building, one that now has five Violets on its facade, her signature pink hair and bandaged knuckles, features resembling different ages.
She runs her fingers over the paint and thinks of Violet’s strength, her fears, her fists. Once a fighter, always a fighter.
“You were different in my dream, too,” Ekko adds as she admires his brushwork. It’s not about changing in her waking life, but about the Powder in the dream, the same dream that inspired this mural. “You aren’t the kind of person who helps other people with their projects. Your ideas change the world. I can’t shake the feeling that that’s who you’re supposed to be.”
They’re probably not dreams, but it’s almost Vander-like, the way he believes in her and does want her to change, just out of her own volition. It’s not Ekko’s fault that he—and all the other Ekkos that exist—keep landing in this world.
§
After she starts keeping the crystals close to her, she’ll see Violet in her dreams, sometimes—the Violet the latest Ekko drew before he left. She appears as a pitfighter the most, with Roman numerals on her cheek and a dyed-black sort-of-mullet. Her dark makeup bleeds from her eyes and down her cheeks, pours onto her neck and collarbones. Sometimes she’s fighting, other times she’ll blow her earnings on alcohol and stumble back to the dark closet of a room she lives in.
Once, she whispered to a Jinx and apologize, said she misses her.
This time, for the first time, Powder feels like she’s standing in that room when Violet returns from drinking. She watches her sister haul herself over to the sink and throw up, her cheek resting against the ceramic. When she lifts her head to look at herself in the mirror, she blinks once, twice—
“Jinx?” she says, a question, while looking straight at Powder. Then, “No. Powder. It’s really you.”
It’s me, she wants to say. It’s always been me.
“Shit.” Violet giggles through her drunk haze. “You look amazing.”
Powder can’t speak even though that’s all she wants. She can’t speak. She watches Violet pass out against the sink and slide down, slowly, onto the floor.
§
Powder jolts upright, gasping. She’s sobbing and she can’t stop the desperate sounds, guttural and raw as she pleads for Violet. Her Ekko wakes with her and wraps his arms around her, rubs his thumbs into her shoulder until she calms down enough to fall asleep into his chest.
§
“This is for you,” he had said, after they kissed, before… “I forgot I was supposed to meet Heimerdinger. I’ll… I’ll come back.”
“Better hurry,” Powder says, lies upon lies. A pit forms in her chest before she says it.
Now, the necklace chain twirls between her thumb and forefinger. The faster the pendant turns, the easier it is to see hers and Ekko’s silhouettes among the flowers. She doesn’t know how he made it or when he had the time, but she watches it, entranced—
She glitches. The pendant glitches, spliced between their faces. It happens before she has a chance to mentally deconstruct Ekko’s talent.
Her heart beats loud in her chest. She stays in limbo, waiting, and it comes again. It’s a nanosecond split between her fingers, a strange colour combination. Blink-and-you-miss-it, but she didn’t, so she stands up and runs.
She already has this gnawing feeling that it’ll be too late when she gets there, but she doesn’t know how she knows that. Her gut rarely lies. She gets to the makeshift lab and leans against the wooden frame, knees threatening to give out under her. Mouth dry, ready to throw up from the exertion, her eyes half-blinded by the lights they created. She watches through it all at the time machine they built behind her trust.
The platform’s covered in it. The triangular points form a large sphere, rotating with various holes, like that Ekko’s absentminded scribbles since he arrived in her timeline. No, she finally thinks, but her mouth is too dry, so what good would shouting do? No, no, wait—
“No!” Ekko shouts from inside the sphere. His mouth moves with something else but the sound gets drowned out—the arcane is so loud—and there’s another flash, smaller, where Heimerdinger once stood, holding both ends of the machine’s cord.
Her legs move again and Powder runs down the stairs two at a time. Ekko—her Ekko—lays in front of the arcane, unconscious but still breathing.
So. She knew. She did know, this entire time, but she never said anything, and now it’s too late. Inside is another Ekko: beaten leather boots, oversized cargo jacket, pants with bright paint splatters all over them. He’s an artist in every world, in every version of him she’s had the honour of meeting, and Powder doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at how normal dried paint looks in a moment like this.
At one point, in every hole of the arcane, she catches glimpes of different Ekkos but it’s too fast to comprehend. In the unfamiliar clothing she commits to memory, he’s holding the time loop contraption with the dancing monkeys. There’s also an orange scarf, white paint around his nose, and his eyes—
First-jump Ekko. First-kiss Ekko. Every Ekko since, the same eyes, but these ones might hold regret or sadness or relief at returning or some mixture of everything, but there’s no time. His body lifts off the platform. His skin stretches in unnatural directions as he reaches out to her with one hand, the worn glove just like his boots, and then the arcane shrinks, microscopic.
She still thinks he might have tried to say something to her, at the end, but it could just be her imagination. It probably is. (She wonders if this is the last time.)
From her arms, Ekko stirs. He groans. “Powder?”
“Hey.” Her voice cracks. She clears it. Refocus her attention. “Hi. You okay?”
“I…think so.” Pause. Another groan. “What happened?”
She doesn’t know how to tell him. (She wonders the same thing, every time.) She says something about how she found him there, and he probably hit his head. They should go back to the Innovator’s Competition before they miss out on who won.
Her own voice might feel foreign, but her Ekko knows her. He sees the moment’s hesitation in her sudden fabrication. (She hopes this really is the last time.)
“I’ll take that for now,” he tells her, the unspoken question hanging between them.
Powder nods, relieved. The pit in her chest grows a little bigger.
(She doesn’t know how much more of this she can take.)
§
“Your sleep seems to be a lot better now,” her Ekko says in a low voice, gentle. He picks at the peanuts on their table at The Last Drop.
“I think so.” Dreamless sleeps. No terrors. No bodily disruptions in the people around her. She thinks back to when the recent Ekko almost took her head off with the first contraption he could get his hands on. “It’s been…”
“Three months.”
“That long already?”
Her Ekko smiles, and Powder’s heart melts. “Guess that means you haven’t had any strange parallel universe dreams.”
She nods. Time must pass differently between timelines, but she doesn’t know what that would mean outside of her own existence. She hopes everything has calmed down in that Ekko’s timeline. Maybe the silence means they fixed everything. Or they’re all dead. Or there’s another disruption somewhere else, another Powder that has to deal with different versions of her partner.
A goodbye would have been nice. She doesn’t say that out loud.
Powder brings her drink to lips and downs it, relishing the sweet, cool feeling.
§
As far as Powder knows, she’s still the only one that knows where to find the mural, and she wants to keep it that way for as long as she can. She committed the path to memory even though that Ekko had covered her eyes when they got close. Her own shrine is one thing, but to see her sister as older than her, on a grand scale… Mural Violet is the only way for Powder to confirm she sees the same Violet in her dreams, from the pitfighting. It’s safer to call them dreams even though they’re more than that.
She touches the brushstrokes, not for the first time. She really hasn’t dreamt of that world in months, and she wonders, over and over again, what it could mean. If it even means anything.
She lays down against the concrete bench and stares up in the tree for a long time. She tells the mural about her day, her week, apologizes for not being able to stop by sooner. “Tomorrow,” she then says. “I’ll return the crystals to you tomorrow, sis. I know not to do anything rash. I just want to try for one more night.”
*
**
***
Sometimes taking a leap forward means leaving a few things behind.
***
**
*
The folded paper in Ekko’s hand splices in time for a fraction of a second, in a way he hasn’t experienced in weeks, and he can’t look to anyone else’s face to check if it was real. He closes his eyes and stores it in the back of his mind. All the thousands of seconds, tens of thousands, that he’s jumped through are finally messing with his brain chemistry. He can wait another day before addressing that.
“You’re here,” she says, her voice rough as it has been, but there’s something else.
“Ha.” His mind really is playing tricks on him. There aren’t many flying ships left in Piltover-Zaun anymore. “I thought you left already.”
“That’s rich coming from you, buster,” she counters, and, okay—
Ekko turns around. It’s Jinx how he knows her, the newly shorn hair with the long bangs, the worn rucksack thrown over her shoulder, but there’s something in her eyes that gives it away beyond that dumb name. She walks closer, carefully, as though worried she’ll spook him, and sits next to him, feet dangling off the edge of their spot—or what became their spot. “You’re—how did you—”
“Wouldn’t be able to tell you. This is the first time I’ve been acknowledged in a dream, or able to talk. Barely played with the contraptions you and Heimerdinger left behind because I didn’t want to get stuck in limbo.” She blows at the bangs in her face. They fall right back where they were. “You did leave your notes behind, though. I hid them in my room.”
Ekko looks at Powder-as-Jinx. “Didn’t the ship leave?”
“Saw some scrawled instructions on the desk when I woke up. I’m guessing she’s headed there,” she says, pointing to herself. “I don’t know how long I’ll be in this body, but I had the feeling it was urgent.”
“It is.” He pauses. “Still enjoying your life?”
“You bet.” Powder beams. “This isn’t about me, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“I wanted to ask. Is my sister in your world?”
Of course. “Yeah, she is.”
“Was she—Is she really a pitfighter?” she asks, and Ekko laughs, loud and long, for the first time in a long while. Maybe he laughed recently and can’t remember it anymore with how scrambled his timing is, but it feels good. And that world felt like ages ago.
“She did, for a while,” he finally tells her. “This world’s been turned upside down since then.”
Powder nods. “The black makeup looked awful.”
“I only ever saw it through a screen. Heard it was a breakup.” She laughs. He adds, “So you’ve seen her?”
“Dreams, I guess. Like this one, but I didn’t have a body.”
Ekko doesn’t know if he should tell her this isn’t a dream, that she did somehow make it into his timeline in a fragmented form in Jinx, and it might have happened just because she had a good night’s sleep, but they never did explicitly talk about alternate universes. Now wouldn’t be the time to start.
She points to his fingers. “What’s on the paper?”
“The war is over.” It feels strange to say it out loud. “Zaun and Piltover finally have a chance to mourn everyone they lost.” He explains the use of the papers, how they’ll dissipate into the air as a little flame rather than burn down to the ground in ashes. He doesn’t know if Powder’s Zaun has these, or when they were invented, but she listens to him intently as if it doesn’t matter.
Then: “Is that… Did I die?”
Ekko did almost write out two papers, one with Jinx’s name—or Powder’s, like a closure; he hadn’t decided—but it didn’t feel right. He hasn’t seen his Jinx since they crashed into the powered-down Hextech gate, so he didn’t know until now that she would make it onto a flying ship and sail away from here. He doesn’t even know where she wanted to end up, just that she wanted to leave after the war. “We wouldn’t be talking right now if you died.”
“That’s a relief. I’m glad I didn’t leave you alone in this world.”
Ekko closes his eyes again and inhales, long and slow. They sit in silence. He doesn’t know how she feels and he doesn’t want to ask, but that world with her felt like it happened ages ago.
Powder puts a hand on his shoulder as she stands. “I should probably follow those instructions I left myself.”
Ekko nods. “Stay safe,” he says, speaking to both of them. He closes his eyes long after her footsteps fade. When he opens them, he’s alone again.
§
When the little flames begin to rise along the bridge, Ekko burns his own paper with the gentlest of flames and releases it into the sky.