Chapter Text
Vi couldn’t sleep.
She wasn’t, in fairness, used to being able to sleep. She didn’t expect it. Didn’t deserve it. So she wasn’t complaining. Not exactly.
In Stillwater, sleep had been a… natural force. Like the wind. Swooping in to claim her once the battered, bruise-stained sack of ambulatory bones that constituted her body had finally gathered the sense to (metaphorically) stand up for itself and say Enough.
A memory, faint as a Zaun morning, pinged off the inside of Vi’s skull. Her mother’s voice.
‘Janna herself has to rock you to sleep, doesn’t she?’
A coarse approximation of a chuckle ground itself from her throat. Somehow, she’d never imagined Janna looking like the Stillwater guards.
She’d be a right sight prettier, for one.
But now that she was Out, sleep was a choice—it didn’t just happen. It was something she had to do. And, wouldn’t you know, as soon as she had agency over something, it all fell apart like a stack of molding firewood.
She’d lie down, clothes on even if they were plastered to her with sweat, luxuriate in a bed softer than it had any right to be, so soft something about it felt inherently deceitful, and…
Wait.
And there lay the crux of the issue.
Wait. Like she’d waited for the barest scraps of food, any food, trembling next to Powder all those years ago before Vander. Waited for her parents, on that final day when minutes turned to hours turned to blood-soaked streets and gas grenades. Waited for the guards to arrive and paint her body purple and black. Waited for news, even a drunken whisper, of the outside world. Waited for P— Jinx.
Vi didn’t find waiting particularly restful.
And that wasn’t right—wasn’t how everyone else worked. But her brain wouldn’t listen, no matter how she coaxed and poked and prodded and meditated, and it didn’t slow her breath, it didn’t still her heart, and the longer she lay there pooling in her own sweat and grinding her fingernails against her palms the more she wanted to— to—
She managed to clasp a pillow—too soft—to her face a fraction of a second before letting out a muffled shriek. It helped. A little.
She was in her own room, that night. She was most evenings.
Would Jinx let Vi sleep in her room? She would. Vi didn’t doubt it for a second. But… She had to be better than this. She had to be stronger. How in the void was she ever supposed to learn to work, to exist, to be a fucking person again if she leaned on her sister, her five years younger than her sister, for something as simple as sleeping?
Besides. Jinx deserved better. Vi had been gone for years. And no, it didn’t matter that it hadn’t been her fault. After that long, the last thing her sister—her five years younger than her, more competent than Vi would ever be given a lifetime, stronger than rebar and more beautiful than stained glass sister—needed was the girl who was supposed to protect her needing her right back. Not like this, and not in… other ways.
So Vi would learn to sleep again, dammit. She’d scrape the tension out of her head with a bone folder if she had to.
Readying herself for yet another cycle—relax, fail, sweat, scream, repeat—she forced her pillow back beneath her head, squirmed her jacket around herself (blankets were a step too far; downright suffocating), and… waited.
But before even one cycle had repeated, her waiting was rewarded by something it’d never borne before.
Was that… a piano?
A pause. She held her breath—an old habit trained into her by the faintest and most forbidding of footfalls.
It was.
Who would possibly—
Well. Jinx. Who else?
Vi felt a faint grin on her chapped lips. Of course those pretty, bony fingers took to music as readily as they always had to everything else. Always the prodigy.
A crusty-eyed glance at the wall clock, mercifully silent and lit by the dimmest vial of diluted shimmer, informed her it was 4:30. Of course.
She didn’t really remember getting up, any more than she remembered being born, or getting into bed. Sometimes things just happened. She found herself stumbling down the Drop’s stairs, the ones that would give you splinters when you least expected it no matter how much you sanded them down, especially— She winced, feeling a stabbing pain. Her insomnia-drenched brain couldn’t even identify whether it was from a splinter or just that same old fucking headache.
At least the piano sounded nice. What was that? Some Piltovan waltz? Vi wouldn’t know a waltz from a jig from a… romp, or whatever, but it wasn’t too quiet and it wasn’t too loud, and right now that was more than enough. It had a sort of—lulling sound too it.
She swayed to and fro to herself, and. Oh. There was the floor. She’d been lucky to dodge a fall—not, of course, that she could feel any worse.
Upward dragged her bleary eyes, forming the expected image of her sister in her mind before they even made it all the way to…
“Oh.”
She might’ve voiced her surprise. She might not’ve.
Slowly, the waltz dragged to a halt. The room seemed to light up, and shit, maybe it did, as an orange eye, smoldering with a ruddy light, locked onto hers.
“Violet,” remarked Silco. “I expected you would be resting.”
The shock—and why had she been shocked, it was his fucking house now, of course it’d be him, it was always him—was enough to drag her far enough from sleep to take in the sight.
He was in… striped pajama pants and a grey button-down shirt. Really?
Come to think of it, she couldn’t think of a time she’d seen him out of his typical vest. The banal outfit made him look startlingly older, bringing out the grey in his hair. It might’ve almost been funny, if the similarity of the pants to the pattern of her own didn’t set some unpleasant fluid stirring in her gut.
Then, barely half a minute late, she remembered to be pissed at all the things she should be pissed at. “Don’t call me that.”
The name had never sounded right, after… that night. Powder’s shrill voice had burnt it out of acceptable conversation forever.
A nod from Silco. “Vi then.”
She fumbled until her hand found her face, in a gesture that’d lost most of its sincerity in the process. “Fucking… Ugh. Thought…”
There was no good way to end that sentence. She turned back to the stairs.
They were dauntingly tall. She prepared to haul a leg—any limb at all, really—up the first step.
“Do you need anything?”
She paused to hear his voice. She shouldn’t answer.
She answered. “How come you care all of a sudden?”
Idiot. She was an idiot. And an argument wouldn’t help her head.
Silco’s reply, when it finally came, had an uncharacteristic frailty to it. “One usually wishes to be asleep at this hour. To ease the minds of those who care for them, if nothing else.”
How dare he… indirectly… guilt trip… Whatever he was doing.
“Can’t.”
“And you say you need nothing.”
“Didn’t say… shit,” she mumbled. “Need you like I need a hole in m’head.”
No reply was forthcoming.
Her foot eventually found its way onto a stair. It felt… high.
“I would advise against that, in your current condition.”
She whirled around, her sleep deprivation turning it into a sort of stumbling flop. “Yeah? What am I supposed to do, huh? Since you’re the fucking boss?”
Why did he look taken aback? What in the pits did he expect her to say?
He ran a hand through his hair. “Sit,” he suggested. When she made no move, he added, “We don’t need to talk.”
She weighed the choice in her mind.
Except there was no choice. The only way she’d get to sleep right now is if she hit her head on the bannister. But it stung, to— No, not stung. Ached.
It ached to hear him be polite. To be polite back to him, even indirectly, by accepting. It didn’t feel wrong, exactly—she didn’t know what was wrong anymore. She just knew it hurt.
So she made for a seat, in a nook near the stairs to what used to be her room—their room—before it was remodeled in padlocks, far enough from the piano that any conversation would be slightly awkward.
The bar sounded uncannily still, with even the stubbornest guests vacated or thrown out hours ago. The scrape of the stools was too much. The silence was too much. It was all too much.
So… “Keep playing,” she said, with a feigned casualty.
He did. It helped.
Vi hated how much it helped.
A moment passed. Sitting was more comfortable than standing, or walking, or even tossing and turning in bed.
But… Well, maybe it was Vander. Never a silent moment where friends and booze are involved, he’d said fondly, on nights when he came upstairs well past three. Maybe it was her raw nerves. Maybe her own damned sumpsnipe stubbornness.
“Why are you up?” she asked tonelessly. She risked a glance directly at the bastard.
His gaze didn’t leave the piano. “I get little sleep, these days. This… passes the time.”
“Relating to me? Neat trick.”
He chuffed, audible over the soft plunk of the piano keys. “We don’t all need to look quite so disheveled.”
“I’m not disheveled,” Vi said, wrinkling her nose.
This time, he did look up. “Your hair is a mess, your clothes reek, and you’re only wearing one boot.”
She squinted down. So she was. No wonder she’d been so off-balance on the stairs. Had she gotten into bed with the thing, or failed to put on the second when she got up? She couldn’t recall. Heat bloomed in her cheeks.
Change the subject. “You’re going to wake up Powder.”
“Your sister,” Silco said, with the frailest hint of an endangered smile, “Could sleep through her own gunfights if she wished.”
But the piano grew audibly quieter.
The bastard, Vi gloomily thought, had an eerie way of spearing every grievance she could voice before she’d had time to come up with the words for its successor.
The worst part was the way he could—twist things, turn them about in dizzying loops until up was down and backwards was forwards. She knew he was a sick son of a bitch. She knew she was more than within her right to think of him like he was dirt on her boot. But when she tried to pin down the why of it…
The shimmer trade consolidates power away from local gangs and weapons traders, he’d say. And he’d be right—at least, as near as Vi could tell. Bribery ensures the predictability of the unpredictable and the loyalty of the disloyal, he’d say. Violence is a comfort to one who’s been raised to know nothing else, he’d say.
Jinx can take care of herself, he’d say.
How was Vi supposed to argue with that?
So she didn’t, existing instead in some bizarre limbo. They fought incessantly, inexhaustibly—but not about anything. Not anything real. That never lead anywhere.
Not that this was leading anywhere either.
She surreptitiously sniffed at her shoulder. It figured that he was right about that too.
Her voice rose in her throat, eager to do what it could for the lost cause of her dignity. “What’s the song?”
A replying series of notes soared up and down the piano. “Concerto Six for Violin and Piccolo,” Silco replied, in the lofty tone of someone who had something fancy about himself and wanted you to know it.
The almost absurdly lofty tone, Vi’s brain noted, now that some of the sleep-fog pickling it had begun to temporarily recede. Was he trying to be funny? Surely not.
For the hell of it—just in case—she raised a mocking eyebrow anyway. “Funky-looking violin you’ve got there.”
His sharp gaze peered at her over the empty music stand on the piano. “Please. Exactly how rich do you think I am?”
He. He was being funny.
Worse, Vi laughed.
First in surprise, then at herself for actually fucking doing it, then in acknowledgement of the actual joke, then because of the whole– The whole everything.
The laugh didn’t count, because she was half-asleep and half-sane and half-dead, and she’d defy any jury to argue otherwise, but surely she’d earned this, because it was all just– just—
Ridiculous.
Sitting there, one boot off, in the reanimated corpse of her second childhood home, cackling at the man who stole her sister, killed her dad, slit the throat of her old life and left her bloodied on the floor of a cell. No—laughing with him, because at some point he’d started too. A low, rasping chuckle that went together with hers like sweet rolls and pickled fish. She heard it, and she saw his face and his bloodshot eye framed just so through the music stand, and that made her fully double over.
After what might’ve been a minute, she gasped in her first breath in far too long.
“I hate you.”
She was reasonably certain that had not been what she meant to say. For whatever reason, right now, that was the funniest thing yet.
“Why do I… Fuck, I hate you so much. You’re… I just…” She giggled, torso bent over itself, too out-of-breath to do anything more. “I just… Fuck.”
It took her a long moment to realize that Silco’s laugh had trailed off. Slightly after that moment had elapsed, it occurred to her exactly she’d just said, and to whom. She warily raised her teary gaze.
Silco was reclining, staring upwards with a detached sort of blankness.
“I believe,” he said eventually, “That you’re in a great deal of excellent company.”
Vi snorted. Leave him to turn an insult into an exchange out of a Piltie romance novel. Someday, she’d find out where he learned to talk like that. Where they all did.
But that wasn’t the point. And if he wasn’t going to defend himself…
“You killed our family.”
She shouldn’t say our—shouldn’t act like she was talking for Jinx when she so clearly felt nothing like Vi did—but she couldn’t pretend that wasn’t what’d happened. That she was the only one sharing a roof with a murderer.
“Several of them,” he acknowledged.
She flinched—at the lack of hesitation, at the banal, conversational tone, at the callousness of it all. She hadn’t expected him to deny it—how could he?—but how could he, how could anyone, just sit there and say things like that?
“How?”
Not why. She didn’t care why.
(She wasn’t sure she cared how either, whatever that meant, but she wasn’t sure of anything right now.)
“What are you hoping I’ll say?” He looked down at last, the shadows of the dimmed chem-lights deepening the lines on his face. “That I wanted to? That I hated you, like you hate me? That it was justified because of some awful great scheme of mine? That I enjoyed it?”
Yes, Vi wanted to scream. All of it. Just—something. Something that was right, something that was wrong, some reason it’d all come crashing down all at once. Something she could point to, and maybe it would sound like justification and she could feel angry, and maybe it’d sound like apology and she could feel sorrow, but either way it would make something make sense.
She wasn’t even sure who she was asking—Silco, Jinx, the chembarons, Janna herself. Because it hadn’t just been him, even if his was the face she put on it, his the eye that labeled the hatred she kept locked in her heart with the flimsiest lock that was the best she could find. He hadn’t brought the hex-crystals. He hadn’t made the shimmer. He hadn’t tied Vander down himself, or even dealt a single killing blow.
It’d been all of it; all of them. A nightmarish contraption of fate spinning on silent cogs, ticking inevitably as the Grey to the end of her world, and she could see every spatter of blood it left in its wake and feel every bruise it left behind but nobody could ever tell her why. And now her family– Her family was dead, and she felt it anew every single day, and– and—
Was it so wrong, after all of that, to want Jinx? Really want her?
There was nobody else left. It was just—her, just Jinx, just Jinx against the whole hulking monster that was everything Vi wanted, needed, couldn’t shake the feeling she was missing, and if every desire she could imagine having somehow, insanely, miraculously fit into the one person, the one perfect, beautiful person she had left, was that really so fucking wrong?
Yes, said the part of her that wasn’t the monster. Funny how much quieter it got when she was too tired to fight. It’d be so easy, to let that part swirl down the drain. To let it just… fade, into the whirlpool of anger and guilt and regret and tiredness.
She hated herself for wanting it. She loved herself for being able to just feel something like that, even if it was monstrous. She was confused as to what she felt, and how she felt it, and why she was thinking about it now of all times.
And none of that would answer Silco’s question.
She wasn’t sure the words would’ve fit out her mouth even if she could find them. Even if she could, thoughts so incomplete were better expressed into the silent judgement of her too-soft pillows than him.
So she answered, “The truth.”
It was close enough.
Silco’s head inclined a fraction of a degree. “You truly are Vander’s daughter, aren’t you.”
Don’t say his name, Vi would’ve said, if the phrase hadn’t sounded quite so much like a compliment.
“The truth can be unsatisfying.”
“Everything can be unsatisfying,” she said. “Just… Give me something.”
A pause.
“You won’t find it.”
“Won’t find—?”
“Whatever it is you’re looking for.”
She looked back to Silco, further questions on her lips, and had to suppress a start. His gaze was narrow; by all rights it should’ve made that horrible eye dimmer, but it burnt like a coal in the dead, cold hearth of the shadows.
“You want answers—anyone would. Everyone does. But the last place, the very last place you should ever seek solace is in the one who hurt you.” He must’ve seen her confusion, because he went on. “It’s human nature to want to forgive and forget. To move on. Get catharsis for what’s been done to you.
“But.” A small, pained grimace that might’ve been a smile in a previous life split his face. “By now, I’ve learned it doesn’t do you much good. People, or societies, don’t often have the answers you want, and when they do, they don’t much care to give them to you. Pain like what we’ve suffered doesn’t have a solution. Better to find something you can do with it, than to hope there’s something, somewhere, that’ll take it all away. All chasing down memories does is lead you closer to the thing that stuck a knife in your back.”
Vi squinted, trying to make sense of that convoluted line of reasoning. “You’re saying,” she said slowly, “That I shouldn’t care what you did?”
“The opposite,” he corrected, sitting up. He steepled his fingers against the piano, which probably meant something psychological but as far as Vi was concerned meant primarily that he wasn’t likely to shut up within the next few minutes. “You care. You don’t have a choice. But you have the choice to accept that—and to accept that nothing I can say would change it. It’s too late for that.”
It’s too late.
Like he wasn’t the reason it was too late. Like he wasn’t the one that fucking did it. Vi’s throat ached—from the effort of holding in sobs or anger, she wasn’t sure.
But it wasn’t as if he was denying it, either. Just the opposite. He admitted it. He told her he couldn’t help. He didn’t lie, he didn’t trick her, he didn’t make any of the excuses she’d run through her head in that miserable cell and promised herself she’d never accept even if he uttered them with her hands around his neck, and what he just said made sense.
Why couldn’t—
Why couldn’t he just be wrong?
Why couldn’t he ever, ever just say something she could look at and throw away, into the garbage heap of the past where it belonged and him along with it? Why did he have to be so— so—
If her nails hadn’t been bitten into nonexistence years ago, they would’ve been a centimeter deep in the skin of her palms.
Silco’s voice, the gentlest dagger she’d ever heard, rose somewhere in the fog of reality. “I won’t apologize for it.”
As if that’d been a risk.
“It would be an insult. To them, to you, to everyone we work for. You’ll… understand why, someday.”
Vi squeezed her eyes shut, praying the tear she felt on her cheek wasn’t visible. The guards had always stayed for longer when she cried. But it was dark. He wouldn’t see. Even if he already probably knew, because he always knew. The sunsucking all-seeing eye.
“But I regret what it does to you.”
Her head snapped up.
He looked—sad. Not calculating, not haughty, not clever or cruel or callous, just… someone. An old man in old pajamas on an old piano in an old house, her old house (and if he’d told the truth about his history with Vander, his old house), sounding as weary as she felt. The expression hung mismatched and ill-fitting from his face; a tapestry on a cell wall.
“It isn’t right, the way we live. This…” He struggled for a word, the first time she could remember seeing him do so. “…Half-life we scrape together out of what the fortunate spit into the street, the refuse and runoff of progress. You shouldn’t have grown up in this. Shouldn’t have been raised in it. Jinx shouldn’t have been. That’s why… That is why…”
He trailed off, rasping out a sigh. “Hate me if you wish. You’ll do what needs to be done, in the end. You and I have that in common.”
“We don’t—” Vi cut herself off. She didn’t want them to– They didn’t have anything in common. She knew that.
But arguing that wouldn’t make him less right. Wouldn’t change what he’d done. Wouldn’t make the apology echoing in her head ring less true.
When she was younger (not young—she couldn’t remember a time she’d felt young), she’d had a temper, worse than she had now. Stillwater had done their best to smother it, or at least the parts of it that faced outwards, but sometimes, when things mattered enough, it’d come back, and her mind remembered the way it’d used to be.
Loud. Rash. Angry—at her siblings, at Vander when he told her she couldn’t punch her way out of something, at every little thing that went wrong, and, more than any of that, at them. Who ‘them’ was changed—Piltover, Enforcers, Silco, after that. It didn’t matter. The anger always felt the same.
She remembered it, because at that, at Jinx shouldn’t have been, that familiar old flame flickered somewhere in her chest. Its target wasn’t what she would’ve expected.
For the first time, she understood, in an eerie way, how Silco has gotten the support he had. That was the sort of voice, and those the sort of words, that didn’t need fists behind them.
What a pair they were.
And maybe…
Maybe if he knew that feeling, knew how it felt to hate them, they didn’t have—nothing in common. Not that she’d admit it.
It was that, though—looking with a hesitant, squinted gaze at her life, wondering how he felt, picking at the parallels with tweezers like some disgusting centipede—that reminded her:
“You said that you shouldn’t look for answers. That it won’t help.”
Silco nodded.
“Jinx did.”
Despite not having been doing anything, he somehow froze. Then, slowly, an eyebrow crept up his forehead.
Explain, it said.
“She—“ Vi’s voice dared to try and crack; she slammed a metaphorical fist into it. “I hurt her. Like you said before. But she never… let go of me, and when I came back… it helped. Her, I mean.”
Silco’s jaw worked silently for a moment. “That,” he said eventually, “Is not the same thing.”
“It is. You said— Look, it doesn’t matter why I hurt her, right? Like you said, it does the same goddamned thing to you whether there’s some righteous bullshit behind it or not.” She didn’t know why she was so intent on this, but she needed to prove it—needed to show him he could be wrong, that people could, could heal together, didn’t just have to rot on alone in some cave in the ground or a cell in Stillwater or an office above the Drop. “It’s not like you know until you ask. And maybe it just hurts you all over again finding out, but maybe— Maybe it works.”
“You got lucky. Jinx got lucky,” Silco countered. “I won’t pretend I don’t enjoy seeing her like this, but if things had gone any other way, if you hadn’t been able to convince her—“
“Would you have forgiven Vander?”
The struggle it took to say it was almost enough to make her miss the way the blood drained from his face at the question.
She didn’t know what had happened between them; between her father and his murderer. She had… ideas. There’d been whispers, sometimes, in Stillwater; stories about the bad blood between the new leadership and the old caretaker of the Lanes, speculation about who’d finally struck first and why. She’d ignored them at first, passing them off as just more of the bastard’s propaganda. But after seven years, she’d gotten an outline of a picture whether she wanted it or not. After, once she was Out, it seemed like everyone was stuck with the same basic sketch of what happened—but everyone had different bits and pieces, and nobody was telling. The walls in Zaun mightn’t have had ears anymore, with every Enforcer scared of the hellfire tincture that was Jinx. But they sure as shit had Eyes.
She didn’t even know what he said had happened. She’d asked Jinx—once she worked the nausea about staying under his roof out of her gut—but she’d been uncharacteristically evasive. ‘He’ll tell you himself. He likes blathering on about it.’
She’d never gotten around to asking; she certainly didn’t plan on it now. She wasn’t even sure it mattered. But every time she felt Silco’s eye burning into her, and every time she caught herself staring at those scars… she wondered.
Silco stood up slowly. For a moment, Vi thought he was going to leave. She wouldn’t even have blamed him much.
But then he spoke.
“For what he did to our dream? To Zaun?” His knuckles whitened on the piano. “Never. But… For this?” He reached to the left side of his face. His fingers hovered delicately, hesitantly, above the scar tissue.
He sighed. “I already had. Long before that night.”
It wasn’t the answer Vi had expected. But she nodded. “Well… There you go.”
Silco rolled his one motile eye, and the familiar, startling childishness of the motion—how much it looked like something Jinx would do as she flopped her head one way or the other, or Vi as she brushed off some bastard’s stupid questions—struck Vi suddenly as she realized that she’d just proved a point by comparing her relationship with her sister to her relationship with… him. She wanted to wipe her hands on something at the thought. But…
If he was wrong—if Jinx could heal despite the source of her pain being in her life, in her room, in her heart, even heal because of it, and Silco had all but conceded the point…
She wasn’t ready to think about what that implied for her own history with the Eye of Zaun.
Besides, it was the middle of the night. It was too late for introspection, and so she could be forgiven—lauded, even—for shoving that line of thinking into the back of her head where she hopefully wouldn’t have to think about it for a decade or five.
“Your sister will worry if you aren’t in bed soon.”
Vi glared at him. She was trying to avoid the implication of sentiments like that right now.
He went on, either ignorant or indifferent to her ire, petty as it may have been. “If your quarters aren’t to your preference, I’m sure we can find something.”
Vi knew perfectly well that her quarters, with their silent door and their too-soft pillows and their bed that felt like it was trying to swallow her, were not the problem. The problem was who was in them—or, rather, who wasn’t in them.
The image of her arms wrapped tightly around Jinx, her blue hair against Vi’s chin, appeared unbidden in her mind. In her sleep-deprived state, she could practically smell her shampoo—practically feel her own arms, her stupid, clumsy arms, against her sister’s skin and her sheets. She blanched, forcing the image from her mind, but it wasn’t quick enough to forestall the sheer amount of longing that coursed through her at the idea.
She couldn’t. Not now. Not yet.
Jinx needed her. That much was obvious. And, as the rat bastard himself had put it, Jinx was taking a risk even being around her right now, so Vi had to at least prove she could stand on her own without leaning on her baby sister. She shouldn’t— It wasn’t— Of course Vi needed her in turn, needed her like she needed water and oxygen and the infinite blue of the sky, but it shouldn’t be the same. She had to be stronger than this.
And that was aside from the fact that she was acutely aware that, in the scenario whose afterimage was still lingering smugly in her mind, Jinx hadn’t been wearing anything under her sheets. The thought was enough to make Vi sick.
It was enough to make her a lot of things.
The heel of her palm ground against her eye, rough and sharp and clear. Good. Let her hurt for what she felt.
“Or…”
Oh. Right. She wasn’t alone.
“You have full run of the building, you know.” Silco tossed a hand idly towards the stairs. “Jinx insisted.”
Vi remembered. She’d been there.
Silco huffed when she didn’t reply, and all of a sudden he was beside her.
“Listen to me.”
“Were you planning on making that a choice this time?” she snipped, almost automatically.
His eye narrowed, and she felt a pang of… something. Not fear; there wasn’t fear anymore. Not with him. Besides, she knew fear. Knew it like she knew the scars on her knuckles. Or the sound of footsteps at a hundred paces.
“I would appreciate if we could speak as adults, if it isn’t too much of a challenge for you?” he continued. “You might not have noticed, but it’s getting rather late.”
Maybe she’d pushed him a bit much. An odd, off-color mix of satisfaction and… guilt, she now recognized, pooled in her gut like fissure runoff.
Really? That was something she had to deal with now too? She supposed he was being uncharacteristically reasonable, but… Fuck. What, was she going to start pining with regret over her childhood alley fights next?
“Alright,” she said, like it was a burden. Not that it wasn’t.
“Thank you.” He drummed his fingers on the piano. “I don’t know what you’re worried about right now, even if you wear your every feeling on your sleeve. I’m really not interested in guessing. But I’ve known your sister a long time.” His gaze met hers with a resoundingly unimpressed stare. “If there’s something you know damned well you should be doing for yourself, don’t expect me to drag it out of you. I know you can be sensible.” A pause. “Neither you nor Vander were ever as thickheaded as you would’ve had everyone believe.”
Something you know damned well you should be doing for yourself.
What a fucking hypocrite.
She could’ve said so. Hell, she could’ve punched him. Nobody could’ve blamed her—at least nobody in earshot who knew what was good for them. She felt her fists tighten.
But—
Fuck.
It wasn’t that there was something she should be doing—in fact, there was something she was trying very hard to avoid doing, no matter how much that sickening longing seeped in and around the cracks in her mind that deepened with every hour she was still awake. Every minute she spent in that house. Every second she was near Jinx.
And she was just so tired.
Was this— What, the universe’s way of giving her permission? Turning a blind eye to the disgusting mess of Vi’s soul, like some parent saying Just have it cleaned up by the time I get back?
She felt a sudden seething anger at—all of it.
Her family was dead. Janna, the void, whatever sick fuck was in charge around here had left them all to rot but her and Jinx. Left her innocence in ashes on a bridge, her kindness in shards on the floor of a cannery, and every bit of her soul that wasn’t some raw, pink thrashing thing on the floor of that cell. That fucking cell.
And whoever was out there had the gall to dangle this in front of her after all of it? To string her along, like some filthy thing out of the Pilt? To dare her to take what she wanted?
The vilest, most sadistic chembaron could never have been so cruel. And she should know by now.
Vi felt her resolve waver.
Then she thought about what she’d been through. What Jinx had been through. What they could’ve had.
So, just for a moment—
Just for a night—
She reached inside herself and crushed that resolve into splinters.
And. Oh. Wasn’t that just so much easier.
She realized, in a detached sort of way, that she was still staring at Silco with what must’ve been a truly bafflingly intense expression, judging by the look on his face. She couldn’t help but grin, the expression feeling crooked and stretched—she almost felt sorry for the bastard. If she was like this when she finally cracked and couldn’t fucking bother anymore, what must he be hiding? He, who already wore his demons like bloody ribbons on his sleeve? Maybe they really were alike.
She stood up, pushed the stool back into place, and shrugged.
“I will if you will.”
Then she walked up the stairs without listening for a response, and made her way towards Jinx’s room.
Because she was tired.