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The report flows from Sevika’s lips like it has hundreds of times before. Brusque, to the point, and sometimes with an edge of cruelty to her tale. Silco can appreciate the latter two for their expediency and usefulness respectively. The former not so much. But she’s not in his employ for her oratory talents, at least not in the classical sense. The men listen to her without question, and in the end that is all he expects from his underlings. To do their jobs.
“One more thing.” He speaks up as she makes to leave. “Have you seen Jinx lately?”
The woman's ever-present scowl morphs into something more unpleasant for a second, as if biting into a fruit to find it rotten inside. She still holds the grudge from losing her arm, and receiving one better than the old as a reward for saving his life. To her credit, it passes as quickly as it comes - he cares little for his underlings opinion on his pupil other than as a gauge for their own worth. She’s so much more than any of them, and none but he can see it.
“Not since our last job, no.”
Sevika takes his responding hum as the dismissal it is, and soon enough Silco is left alone in his office.
Truth be told he hasn’t expected her to have seen Jinx, but given the girl’s fickle nature it’s always better to check than not. He hasn’t seen his ward for three days now. That in itself is not a vanishingly rare occurrence - Jinx does as she pleases. This includes disappearing for days at a time while she pursues whatever idea caught her fancy to its conclusion, or to abandon it mid-through, having grown bored of it.
What has put his mind ill-at-ease is the food left just as he has left it out for three days in a row now. Normally, even though he may not see her, Silco can at least see the evidence left of her presence in the form of a dirty plate left on the table, or the mess she leaves in her search for one particular gizmo needed for her gadgetry. He would’ve put more effort into curbing such behavior than he has, were it not a way to keep track of her, and to make sure she's’ not skipping entire days worth of meals.
A sigh blows past Silco’s lips. It appears he’ll have to clean out his schedule for the day after all.
(-)
The trip down to what he’s come to think of as Jinx’s lair takes Silco the better part of the time he originally set aside for discussing a deal for retrofitting another mine with chemtech, as well as the deal for the materials required for it if all went to plan. If he were to turn back now, he’d only have to cram one more meeting into the already busy tomorrow.
But it’s either this or foregoing sleep tonight, because some things can wait.
Some can’t.
The woes of taking in a child... Silco had not expected to find out anything about Vander which would make him respect the man more rather than less following his death. Yet, dealing with just one of the four children the man was raising is proving a challenge. He can’t begin to imagine all four together.
He purposefully walks across the propeller blade which makes for the floor with as much noise as can be made without outright stomping to give Jinx the heads up about his presence. Successfully sneaking up on the girl is painful at best, deadly at worst.
Whether the teen hears him or not, she doesn’t make her own presence known, the only sign of it being the scrap littering every available surface near the workbench bathed in the dim light of the glow-lights - some of which he fails to avoid stepping on with a wince. He’s fairly sure at least some of it must be explosives.
“Jinx? Jinx, are you here?” he calls out to no effect. “Jinx?” He looks upwards, aware of the girl’s propensity for climbing, but also to no avail.“Jinx!”
“Ssshhh! They’ll hear you!” A barely there whispers sounds from-
...Ah. One of those days, then.
Quietly as he can, Silco walks up to the couch on the far end of one of the blades, for once conspicuously void of that horrid mannequin. He can only hope Jinx has thrown the thing down the fissure. He’d rather not try again after the first (and last) time he’d tried to do so himself.
He sets the bag in his hand on the table standing in front of the empty couch, before lowering himself to the ground.
“Hello,” he whispers.
A pair of blue eyes flash at him from the dark, the look in them somewhere between rage and panic. It’s hard to tell at the best of times when she gets like this.
“What are you- no-no nevermind. Get in here before they see you!” she whispers right back.
Well. Silco supposes his suit is due for a washing regardless.
It’s a tight squeeze even with both of them being on the thin side, but eventually, they both fit under the couch - how Jinx got it all the way down here, he’s no idea. She certainly didn’t ask for help moving it. Or getting it. And with good reason. The piece of junk smells like decades of use.
Finally settled in, shoulder to shoulder and faintly feeling the maddened thumping of Jinx’s heart through her skin, he once more directs his eyes upon the girl. The anger is gone, as is the panic. Now fear remains. The same fear which had burned itself into his memory after seeing it in his friends’ eyes so many times in his youth whilst hiding from the enforcers, or the gangs, or the merchants they stole from.
“So-”
“Quiet!’ Jinx hisses out, grabbing his hand in an almost painful grasp.
“...So.” he begins anew in a voice so low he can barely hear himself. He’d say Jinx should be able to on the account of her hearing being so much younger, but, well. She enjoys drowning the world out with noise entirely too much for him to chance such a guess anymore. “Why are we hiding here?”
“They’ve been angry again-” She explains with a frantic look to her. “-but left. For now. I- If they can’t find me, maybe they’ll leave.”
Right. They . Never once has Jinx given a name to any of the voices haunting her, but it hadn’t taken Silco terribly long to figure out exactly who she means.
“Do you really think it’ll work?” he asks out of obligation rather than hope.
“I… maybe? For a bit?”
Only ever a little bit. Only until the pendulum swings the other way and she’s begging her friends to come back. To forgive her. That is unless they don’t come back on their own first. He saw it happen in person, once. The sudden shock on her face mid-through conversation. She’s been careful not to let him see again. Not to let her weakness show. To sequester herself away when she can feel it coming and is powerless to stop it, so the only thing she can do is remove herself from his sight.
Everyone has their ghosts to deal with, Jinx’s are just more persistent than most. That she is so strong in spite of it is a marvel to behold. It makes Silco wonder what she would be like if only she could…
But she can’t. And neither can he come up with a solution that will magically make it all disappear. Neither can anyone else. He’s checked far and wide. What goes on behind the closed gates of those so-called institutes gave him quite a few ideas to use on his enemies, but to let his own suffer through it? Only a Topsider would ever have the gall to call it help.
It’s the very essence of Piltover. Sweep the problem under the rug where it may fester out of sight and mind. Flush it down the Lanes where it’s not them that will have to smell it.
Ultimately, he can only give Jinx the same thing he’d needed to overcome his own past.
Time.
And perhaps something he didn’t have.
Someone to help her through it all.
“How long has it been? Since they left?” he asks.
“Yesterday? I think? I- I don’t…” her eyes grow distant, looking somewhere he can’t.
“You don’t remember?” he prods, snapping the child out of her mind. She can spend minutes in there. Perhaps even hours when he’s not there to bring her out.
“I don’t remember yesterday.” She pauses again, fidgeting in place. He gives her hand a firm squeeze. “A-a-and then they weren’t there. Or up there.” She raises their joined hands to tap their backs against the couch above. “So I hid here.”
He hums in understanding. For any other adversary Jinx has bullets and bombs, neither of which can help her in a fight against her own mind.
“So you’ve been hiding here since yesterday?” He raises his voice a little bit, just enough to be above whisper.
“I think so.”
Well, that’s no good.
“How much longer, do you think?”
He feels, more than sees, the shrug she gives him in answer.
“You can’t let them keep you here forever. You’re the one in control.” Once again, Silco tests waters by speaking a bit louder, once again without a protest.
“I know, I just- I didn’t want to deal with them.” She presses her forehead against his shoulder. “It’s so quiet. It’s never this quiet. Just wanted it to stay like that for a while.”
Silco says nothing, unwilling to disturb the silence Jinx is so intently listening to.
Minutes pass as they lie there together, joined by their hands. Silco doesn’t count how many. He focuses on the pulse of the smaller hand in his palm as it slowly calms down. On the breathing by his side as it fades beyond the range of his hearing. On the memories of their moments like this.
They began soon after he took Jinx, then Powder, in. He didn’t understand at first. He still doesn’t, really. He expected the nightmares, the screams, and the crying which he’d heard late at night in those first months. The girl had killed nearly her entire family. Silco, too, dreamt about Vander in that time, if without tears. The little hand shaking him awake at night in askance for chasing the ghosts away was also foreseeable.
The ghosts not going away, wasn’t.
“I’m sorry.” It’s Jinx who finally breaks the silence.
“What about?” he asks, voice back to normal.
“You had stuff to do right? And you’re here. Because of me.”
Silco squeezes the smaller hand in reassurance.
“Nothing that couldn’t use a day to stew. You know how it works.”
“Ugh.”
He allows himself a chuckle at the teen’s reaction. She makes no secret of her distaste for anything even remotely in need of patience. Letting a client wait for a day would be more unbearable to her than the other party. Silco suspects the girl won’t ever have a mind for business, but she doesn’t need to. She’s perfect as is. making her into something she’s not would only diminish her, and come out with something that could never measure up anyway.
“Do you want to get out from under here?”
“...Okay.”
Getting out from under the old piece of furniture is, somehow, more difficult than getting beneath it, mostly because of his joints protesting at his lying on the cold ground for so long. Once standing, Silco pats himself down to shake off what dust he can, before turning to Jinx, who for her part is warily eyeing her surroundings, her whole body taut like a spring ready to jump, and completely unconcerned with the dirt coating her skin.
“I brought dinner,” he says once he sits on the couch, gesturing to the bag he’d placed on the table before.
“Not hungry,” Jinx mutters.
“It’s Jericho’s.” He extends one of the two boxes from the bag to the girl, having anticipated just such a response. And, exactly as he anticipated, she all but snatches the box from his hand, then drops by his side.
It’s not that she doesn’t eat, exactly. She just needs to be reminded she wants to, and the old fish-man’s slop never fails to do the trick. Having overcome his initial reluctance to try it, Silco can see the appeal. It’s a staple of Downside to make do with what they have, rather than what they want. The food, suspect in appearance as it may be, tastes as good as his own favourite childhood scraps.
He never did learn how to make them like his mother used to.
Just as he’s about to grab his paper spoon, Silco spies Jinx submerging her hand - dirty with dust and grease, right into the slop - to fish out some sort of slug-like favourite of hers.
“If you’re not going to use the spoon then at least wipe your hands, first.” He puts his own box away to untie his cravat, knowing full-well the chances of finding a relatively clean piece of cloth in the vicinity. “Here.”
“What’s even the point?” The teen rolls her eyes, but nonetheless complies with his request after dropping the slug back into the box. “Have you seen Jericho’s kitchen?”
“Yes, and so far as I can tell, he doesn’t use industrial grease in his cooking.”
“Same difference.” She finishes wiping her hands as best as can be done, and throws the crumpled-up cravat back into his lap, from where Silco picks it up to put into the bag he’d brought the food in.
“Call it a matter of principle.“ Just because they have both eaten things nobody topside would think to call food, doesn’t mean it’s how things should be.
They eat mostly in silence, if one were to exclude the variety of noises made by Jinx as she slurps her meal up. Usually, she can’t help but talk about anything and everything on her mind. Now, however, her eating is only broken up by her nervous glances all around every few bites, rather than by a deluge of topics ranging from the latest toy she’d built or is planning on building (harmless and not), to a planned or concluded raid on a noncompliant business partner.
“Will you be coming back up anytime soon?” He pauses eating after a few bites, already full and waiting for the inevitable.
“Maybe. I dunno, I’ve been working on- something.” Her face scrunches up in confusion, then clears as she once again scans her surroundings. She puts the box to her mouth and drinks the remaining sauce to the last drop. “Can’t remember what. Something big.”
Silco leans back, searching his memory for a mention of what it may be that Jinx could be building. Something big, she says. There’s a variety of things she could mean by that - usually big bombs to cause big explosions, but also less conspicuous odds and ends, on occasion without any particular use other than her own fancy - like a shimmer-powered blowtorch. Usable, yes absolutely, but completely pointless due to the astronomic difference in cost and availability between shimmer and regular fuel.
“Maybe the purifier?”
“What? No, no. I got that done last week. Didn’t I tell- I didn’t tell you. Hey, you gonna eat that?”
Silco is not, in fact, going to eat the rest of his takeout. The better part of the reason for bringing it in the first place was for Jinx to eat it. He’d have brought another box for later, as well, but he hopes to drag his protegee out of her lair.
“Thanks,” she says as he hands her the box, then proceeds to stuff her cheeks full.
“If you were working on it, don’t you have it around?”
“That’s the thing! I know I’ve been working on something, but it’s not here!” She winces at her own tone of voice and drops it down to nearly a whisper once again. “ They’re not here either. I don’t know what happened yesterday, but something did. Got to have.”
Correlation, Silco knows, doesn’t equal causation. However, the absence of Jinx’s project, as well as that of her mannequin’s is likely to be linked. Perhaps even to the state he’s found her in.
“Well, if it’s not here then you either threw it down the fissure-” She shakes her head no. “-or took it someplace else. Either way, you won’t find it here.”
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing.” She points an accusatory finger at him with a scowl, the effect somewhat ruined by her puffed-up cheeks. “You’re trying to get me outta here.”
“Obviously. But am I wrong?
The girl petulantly turns her head aside, scarfing down the last of Silco’s leftovers before throwing the box on the table and falling back into the sofa.
“No. Just-” Yet again, she scans their surroundings with suspicion coloring her eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t know what. I just don’t want to. Not yet.”
Hmm.
“Was it a bomb?”
“Don’t think so. Doesn’t ring a bell, anyway.”
Which is as good as they’re going to get for the moment. The memories might return, they have in the past, but usually only after a little encouragement in the form of a familiar landmark or the right word to jog the mind.
“Then I suppose it won’t hurt if we stay here for a little while longer.”
“We?” The girl perks up.
“You didn’t think I was going to send you out alone, did you? I’m as curious as you are about what you’ve built.”
For the first time since he’s come down, Jinx’s eyes stop their wandering and focus solely on him. Such soulful eyes. Not always easy to read but always so very expressive. That is how he can tell it’s coming when she throws herself at him for a hug, smearing dust all over him again.
Silco has no great experience with such casual contact. None, in fact, between Vander’s betrayal and the day his old friend died. He’s quickly had to learn since, and Jinx has given him plenty of opportunity for that.
“You’re the best,” she murmurs into his chest.
He can almost believe it when she says it in moments like this.
“I try.”
It’s the least he can do.