Jinx falls into fire and forgiveness.
It’s an instinctive strike, the lunge at the gauntlet—one last measure of good intentions that she tried to make count. An act of saving that someone might remember her by. The very thing that she should’ve been able to do from the very start. What a funny feeling, that. It doesn’t even hurt. Even as her knuckles rammed into the crystal compartment and the weight was dragged down with her; even as the familiar, heavy presence of the wolf tugged at her waist; even as their falling speed caused the wind to sting against tired eyes and open cuts. She feels nothing.
She doesn’t hear Vi scream, not really. Oh, it’s there. But the sound is muted, almost silent. Blanked-out. A headache waiting to hurt. Ringing in the thick haze of a selfish calm that only the dying could imagine. Underwater. Clogged in her ears, wrapped around her head, all three of their voices dimming the further down the tower she and the beast went.
Then, for a moment, just a moment, the world stills.
(No laughter in her head, no images inside her mind. Just this. Only this.)
Her sister’s desperate expression shifts into that of the hound’s guttural snarl. Flush rose hair covered in soot and grime fades to gold fur lined in black; a smoke-grey gaze tinged in blue exchanged for that tight, arcane tangle. White teeth like glass inch dangerously close to her face. Their closeness makes every detail sharp. It’s nothing at all like baring herself to an animal. Whatever Viktor had done to this body, this husk, this damn vessel—it wiped all the traits of a monster clean. It isn’t anything like the time he—Warwick—attacked her in Stillwater. No trails of saliva, no sign of breathing, no sign of hunger or vengeance or survival. It’s just that. He just is. Lifeless—and yet perfect. A most wonderful machine.
It makes her stomach twist. Something like half-grief and half-relief coils around the muscles where he digs his claws into. Her hand drifts to his face. She can’t tell why she does so. Maybe it’s out of sentiment; maybe it’s out of desperation. A final lunge at a farewell countlessly lost to them. But it’s a well-worn move, she supposed: the motions in perfect synchrony with how Vi used to hold her—both in their childhood, before they’d thrown themselves to the fires; and during their reunion, before the remnants of Powder wasted herself on that blasted bullet-ridden bridge. Fingers draped across a cheek. Palms forged in violence clamped down by fictive psalms of peace.
She reaches out; she touches him—and she tests if Warwick is still warm, hoping even beyond all broken hopes that for a second Vander might yet return. He doesn’t. Not quite so. His eyes—that fucking muddle of all things natural and unnatural—show her everything. A thousand truths and a million more possible realities. Cries of joy and delusions of contentment. Timelines branching out like veins aching in pipe dreams and powder blue. The biddings of a man-made god crushed into the reflection of one mere soul.
Despite it all, she smiles.
It’s a soft thing. Easy to give. Unstrained, so very different from the old ones she always painted on. There’s no mocking edge to it, no deprecating tilt, no nonchalant stretch—nothing at all and no one compared to the character she played up and lived as. The cracked-out, neon-bright grin is missing; the erratic shifts pulverised into off space.
Down, down, down the blue—rain and river water mixing into one; the crackle of the crystal twinkling above a lowered body.
Slowly, surely, the silly girl smiles.
The further down the tower they went, the sharper it became. The more daring.
He isn’t attacking. He has her in his grasp, but he isn’t tearing her to shreds.
It’s in that quick strike of time Jinx knows, Powder knows: maybe a part of him was still in there somewhere.
Acknowledging the fact that she can’t save him, that all these precious seconds are good for is the pull of his mass with hers, as the two of them could never escape. Dipping her heart into the slim chance that she can sight his kindness one more time. Thinking that, if she plucked out each individual follicle and peeled back the grain, then she would see Dad: only asleep underneath those crystal-coloured tears, or better yet, trapped—even despite all odds, even despite all their grievances. Feigning an idea where, somehow, in some way, he wasn’t going to let go so easily—and not because it’s what the beast demanded of him, but because the man who called himself Vander remained, because the father she’d missed still squirmed beneath that skin of metal and magic.
He’s still there. He’s still there.
(It’s easy to pretend, even now.)
This is the one thing she can have for herself.
So, she takes the monkey bomb from her belt, and she finishes what they started in that little corner by those silver cells.
She only hopes he can be proud that she made this choice.
Jinx falls into fire and forgiveness—
—and finally, finally, finally—
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