Chapter Text
She heard the baby’s cry. Though she wasn’t sure she could call it a “cry”; it was more like a whimper, a soft murmur that grew insistent the more it was ignored by her mother.
The little one demanded food, warmth, attention. Arms to hold her and make her feel safe — but for Jinx, it was like hugging a rosebush and driving all its thorns into herself at once.
Or at least that’s how it had been during Isha’s first weeks of life.
Isha, Isha, her beloved Isha.
Those sweet honey-colored eyes that came into the world to change her life — to make it better and harder in equal measure (sometimes one more than the other). Even so, she would never be capable of trading her for anything, not even if she could see her parents again, or Silco, or any of her dead siblings. She wouldn’t trade Isha for all the treasures an ancient deity could offer her.
Nor Isha nor Kyan. Her bold Isha and her gentle Kyan.
Kyan, the fleeting blue light who nearly abandoned her before ever touching her arms, before opening her eyes to a raw and cold world, just like the skin that covered her the day Jinx brought her into the world, wrapped in her own cries and her mother’s muffled screams as she desperately tried to pull her back to life.
Ekko was an angel who, without knowing why, wished to fulfill Jinx’s deepest longing. Who, without knowing how deeply she yearned for it, did the impossible to bring her daughter back to life.
A tiny little girl, the pink-eyed treasure of a family that spent months determined to protect her with everything they had.
And, to the fortune of both young parents, life seemed to grant them a well-deserved rest after the war.
The morning sun caressed Jinx’s pale skin. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply as the clean air drifted into her lungs. The single bluish braid that fell over one shoulder in daring waves rested against her chest. She no longer had to hide memories or grief in a tangled mass of hair trailing across the floor; now she simply styled it the same way she styled her daughters’.
She sharpened her hearing, shivering as she remembered what she used to listen for in her wild youth: finding enemies, chasing Firelights. And she heard tiny footsteps rushing toward her.
Little hands wrapped around her thin fingers and tugged at her. Jinx smiled with her eyes still closed, then slowly lowered her gaze to her daughter.
Kyan looked at her with wide, curious, sparkling eyes. Identical to hers, but innocent, without a trace of malice, pain, or hatred. Eyes untouched by the cruelty of the world — a world Jinx herself had worked hard to beautify for her.
She lifted her into her arms with a broad smile and brushed her nose with the tip of her own. Five years had passed since Kyan first saw the light of day, and she still fit perfectly in her mother’s embrace.
“Where were you, little bug?” she asked in a sweet, high-pitched tone reserved only for her and Isha.
The girl smiled at her mother’s playful touch and pointed behind Jinx. Isha took a hunter’s stance and pounced on her, feline eyes sharpened, ambushing Jinx with a kiss on the cheek. Soon, the young woman had both girls in her arms.
“You took your time, little trouble,” Jinx teased, nuzzling her daughter’s neck. “Feels like I’ve been waiting for you two for centuries.”
She set each one at her sides and clasped their hands tightly. In front of them lay Piltover — or what it had become: a blend of its revolutionary grandeur and its efforts to adapt to Zaun as its equal. In front of them, below them.
Jinx slid the soles of her boots over the concrete tiles; the edge was close, and the next rooftop didn’t seem too far from the one beneath their feet. Kyan stepped back with a tremble while Isha stepped forward, her impatience halted by her mother’s grip.
“Easy, my girl, you’re ready for this, just like Isha was when she was your age,” Jinx told her, crouching to her level to reassure her with a maternal smile.
Isha peeked over their mother’s shoulder and grinned from ear to ear at her little sister. A smile that filled Kyan with trust and confidence — almost too much for such a small body.
Jinx stood again, tightening her hands around her daughters’, and leapt into the void, capturing in her chest the rush of adrenaline she hadn’t felt since the war ended — and the bubbling laughter of the little leeches she herself had brought into the world.
Life was simpler when her babies, in some way, were still… babies.
But the years pass; time moves forward like a river slipping mercilessly through Jinx’s fingers, without farewell, faster than it seems. Silent, taking everything along with it. Carrying away her daughters’ innocence, the way they looked up to her — like a war hero, a leader, a revolutionary, a mother.
Jinx slid her fingers over the wood. The office had stayed exactly as she remembered it: the dusty couch, the old desk, and the chair behind it that had never been used again since Silco’s death.
“Today is Isha’s sixteenth birthday,” she said, as if someone were listening to her from behind that imposing velvet backrest, but the only answer she received was a sharp silence. “You missed sixteen years of her life… and of mine. Eleven of Kyan’s, and as for Ekko’s, honestly I doubt you’d care.”
The office remained in a gloomy silence, just as she remembered from that time when, pregnant with Kyan, she had gone to him for advice, to demand help regarding the war and how to be a mother.
This time was no different; once again, she was speaking to the dead.
“Now I feel as old as you were when you found me, when you found… Powder,” she continued, a bitter taste in her throat. “I suppose that makes you even older now, like Vander. Although it’s hard to tell with him, you know, because of the hair… and the fangs. Vi is the one who takes care of him now — or he takes care of her; honestly, I’m not sure.”
Her gaze wandered over the office. The faded upholstery, dulled by years, was hidden behind a wall of paper sheets. Colorful, disproportionate drawings her daughters used to make as a gift for their grandfather.
Jinx picked up the most recent one lying on the desk. Kyan had made it with every shade of blue she could find at home, and a few green brushstrokes she used to depict Ekko’s silhouette. The girl was the one who drew for him the most; she wanted her grandfather to witness how much his granddaughters had grown.
At first glance it seemed Kyan was the only one who visited that makeshift offering to Silco, but Jinx could swear she had seen Isha enter and leave the office more than once in recent days. She missed him more than she cared to admit.
“She would have loved to meet you,” she murmured, sticking the drawing onto an empty space on the upholstery. “And you would have adored her. Even though she looks like her father, she’s brave but cautious, and much more gentle than Isha.”
Jinx let herself fall into the chair in front of the desk with a heavy sigh.
“Isha… she’s the reason I’m here. With her, it’s more complicated,” she said, lowering her gaze to her anxious fingers tapping on her thighs. “It’s like neither Piltover nor Zaun is enough for her; she just wants to go out and face the world.”
She finally lifted her gaze to the back of the chair, hoping that at any second Silco would turn around to look at her with those green eyes that never scolded her enough.
“How did you do it with me? It couldn’t have been easy… I blew up everything I touched. Isha is amazing — she’s achieved things I only managed to do at twice her age, and that… terrifies me. I know there’s no more war or danger, but she’s no longer a baby I can keep safe by my side… she’s no longer my baby.”
She fell silent, staring at the chair from beneath her lashes, exactly as she would have looked at Silco if he were there. And she knew perfectly well what he would have told her in the end: “Just because she’s no longer a baby doesn’t mean she’s stopped being your daughter, nor that she no longer needs your protection — but you must learn to trust her.”
She rolled her eyes. She already had her answer; she didn’t even need to come here to know what she had heard in her head. But it was more comforting to believe that Silco, somehow, had illuminated the path that led her to that conclusion.
The door swung open; years of stored dust shot into the air, and Jinx had to squint to keep the dirt from stinging her eyes. Sevika stormed in, fuming.
“Your brats again!” she shouted.
With her good hand she held Kyan by the shoulder, while with the robotic one she lifted Isha by the arm. When she released them in front of their mother, both stared down at the floor. Jinx looked at them from above, brow furrowed and magenta eyes blazing.
“The main street is a complete disaster! Paint bombs! They threw paint bombs everywhere!”
Jinx bit her lips to hold back the laugh that would have humiliated Sevika.
“If you don’t do something this time, I’ll hang both of them by the ankles,” Sevika threatened.
The mother sighed and motioned for the woman to step out of the office with her. Jinx closed the door behind them with a slow movement.
“Listen…”
“No, you listen,” Sevika cut her off. “I know that for you all this still feels like a game, but you need to be more mature. You’re their mother. They still can’t understand the damage they can cause. What would have happened if they’d killed someone? Or killed each other?”
Jinx swallowed hard, trying to fake a carefree smile.
“They were just paint bombs.”
“Are you sure?” Sevika pulled from her pocket one of the grenades she’d recovered from the scene; it was identical to the ones the young woman used to make in her youth. “What would have happened if the mechanism had been even slightly different, Jinx?”
Jinx’s eyes went wide, a shadow crossing her face that reflected a torturous memory. Sevika exhaled, staring at the ceiling. Her relationship with Jinx hadn’t always been good, but that didn’t give her the right to awaken the ghosts that had haunted her all her life.
“They don’t know what it means to repeat history, but you do. Plant your feet on the ground and keep those girls from going down the same path you were forced to walk.”
Jinx hugged what remained of Isha’s homemade grenade against her chest; a shiver ran up her spine.
“You owe Renne one,” Sevika said as she turned away. “She had to convince the Prime Minister not to cut ties with Piltover. She promised it wouldn’t happen again, so you’d better make sure it doesn’t.”
The office door opened cautiously. Kyan poked her nose in, looking first at her mom and then at Sevika leaving. The little girl darted out, rushing past her mother.
“Vika! Wait!”
Sevika barely turned at the girl’s call before Kyan grabbed onto her mechanical arm, lifting her feet off the ground. The woman tolerated drawing a smile Jinx had already expected. When Kyan set her feet back down, she dug into the pocket of her overalls and offered her a piece of candy.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly.
Sevika frowned. Kyan’s bright eyes had already conquered her once. When she learned to speak (after learning to walk), she had picked up the habit of calling her “Vika,” not being able to pronounce her full name correctly.
Isha had a bizarre sort of fondness for her, like the one Jinx felt for her, but Kyan truly adored her, since Sevika took care of them whenever Mom and Dad had important matters to resolve (because they were still occasionally summoned by the new Council of Piltover and Zaun).
Tiny Kyan didn’t like strangers, so she would shriek over and over until Sevika took her in her arms instead of leaving her in the care of some former Firelight comrade of her father’s.
“Vika! Vika! Vika!”
The first time she called her that, when she melted the armored heart of her grandfather’s guardian, Kyan refused to leave her side for the rest of the night, curling up in her arms, her little head resting on her shoulder.
Since then, Jinx had changed her attitude toward her, especially after finding little Isha—only seven years old at the time—tucked into her bed while Sevika slept soundly with Kyan on her lap.
That was when she understood that Silco hadn’t left her completely alone.
Jinx trusted her; she hated trusting her. But she did anyway—perhaps too much—and that’s why she believed her word when she told her that what her daughters had done was dangerous.
“Kyan, go with Sevika. She’ll take care of the punishment you deserve,” she said in a calm voice.
Sevika didn’t object. She knew Jinx well enough to know that she understood the “punishment” wouldn’t go beyond washing off the paint they had splattered in the square. When the two disappeared toward the bar, Jinx returned to the office. Isha was standing in the middle of it, staring at her grandfather’s desk, trying to grasp the blurry memories of her earliest childhood.
“So,” Jinx began, “smoke bombs? What paint did you use? Did you base it on your father’s notebook this time or—”
Isha raised her gaze, her haughty eyes stabbing into Jinx like thorns. Thorns from that rosebush she had feared embracing for so long.
“You did something new,” Jinx continued, her voice darkening. Isha looked down the instant her mother placed the homemade grenade on the desk. “We already talked about this.”
Isha narrowed her eyes, taking a firm step forward. A gesture she used to object—to highlight her stance.
“Kid, we agreed it was dangerous for you to try new engineering. What would’ve happened if you miscalculated? What if it had really exploded with you and Kyan right there?”
“But it didn’t!”
Isha protested. Her mother planted herself in front of her, back straight.
“It’s not enough!” she exclaimed, slamming her fist on the wood. The grenade skeleton jumped and Jinx snapped back to herself, taking a breath. “Isha, understand, this is dangerous… I just want to keep you safe.”
“By forbidding me from doing what I love? What’s wrong with it if you’re the one who taught me since I was little? You’ve always done the same!”
“I only did it because it was necessary. We were at war; we needed to defend ourselves. But that’s not the case anymore. If I’d had the life you have now, do you think I would’ve made the same choices? Everything would’ve been different…”
She stepped back, curling her fingers around the edge of the desk.
“Yes, even me.”
“No…” Jinx tried to reach for her daughter’s shoulder. “No, Isha. You lit up the dark abyss my life was. The decision I made about you… it’s the only right one I’ve ever made.”
Even though at the time she thought it would be the worst of them all.
Truly, from the moment Isha moved inside her womb for the first time, Jinx had never regretted choosing to keep her—choosing her.
The door opened again, and Jinx cursed silently; it was obvious she’d be having a long talk about privacy with her family after this. Ekko poked his head in. The girl immediately noticed the mass of white dreadlocks tied in a high ponytail that, for some reason, he’d insisted on keeping once he started feeling like “a real adult.”
Isha looked at her mother from beneath her brows. Jinx sighed and allowed her to leave the office, passing right by her father. The girl dropped onto the couch, limbs fully stretched out and her neck over the backrest, letting her head hang in the empty space behind it.
“It’s just a phase,” Ekko said, hiding a smile, “don’t worry.”
“An eternal phase?” Jinx asked. Ekko smiled, sitting beside her. “Sometimes I just wish she would go back to being that tiny little girl I fell in love with the second I saw her. The innocent child who followed me everywhere.”
“She was never going to be a little girl forever, Jinx.”
“She was too young back then to remember what this technology did to us… or to understand the war.” She sighed. “I just want her to enjoy the life she has now—the one we worked so hard to get for her, for both of them.”
“It’ll be complicated if you don’t explain things in detail…”
“I’m not going to tell them the details. I can’t ruin…”
“Their favorite bedtime story?”
Jinx carved something that tried to be a smile. She looked up at the archaic lamp hanging from the ceiling by nothing more than a plastic-coated cable.
“It’s easier to sleep now… I just want everything to stay like this—no more war, no more… death.”
Jinx covered her face with both hands, trying to steady her breathing. Ekko placed a firm hand on her thigh.
“Well, love, if you keep hiding the real difficulties we went through, maybe they’ll keep believing it wasn’t as bad as you say.”
The girl clasped her husband’s hand with both her palms.
“There are things I want to forget. Don’t you?”
Ekko made a tight fist with his free hand. The memory of Kyan—barely a newborn—abandoned by him in that Herald’s meadow, surrounded by yellow flowers and a handful of brainless underlings who nearly snatched her away forever, returned like a stake driven into his chest.
A decision that, even now, eleven years later, still tormented him.
“Sometimes you have to make mistakes to learn from them,” he said, loosening the knot in his throat. “And we have to give our daughters that same opportunity.”
Ekko’s warm fingers contrasted with the cold on Jinx’s cheek.
“At least we can take comfort in the fact that if they fail, we’ll be there to support them. They’re not alone. They never have been.”
Jinx smiled, leaning her face into the boy’s steady hold.
“I hate when you’re right.”
Arguing with Mama had become routine. Even though Isha could swear there was a time when things weren’t like that. Her mother’s words had never stopped being sweet, but she—as the listener—had stopped perceiving them that way. Maybe it was something Mom didn’t fully understand.
It wasn’t that she had stopped loving her—of course not. It had always been them and only them against the whole world, but she wasn’t a little girl anymore, and Mom needed to start understanding that.
A sharp thud sounded behind her, and she didn’t even have to turn around to see who was making their best effort to enter the hideout they had raided from their mother.
“Mama wasn’t too hard on you, was she?”
Kyan got up from the floor, pretending her knee didn’t hurt from the impact. Isha shook her head immediately, shrugging. She didn’t take her eyes off the grenade skeleton her mother had forgotten to retrieve from her grandfather’s desk. Now it would have hundreds of modifications that would really make it work.
The younger girl wandered around the place; the old walls, covered in metal plates, looked as if they would soon fall apart. An old fighting robot, barely held up by a spring-loaded base, stood at one end of the room. Behind it, a scoreboard spelled out four names in order:
Violet.
Powder.
Claggor.
Mylo.
“Did Mama never tell you what this place was?”
Isha turned toward her with a tired look.
“We didn’t come here much. Just once, and it didn’t end well back then.”
“Why?”
“I don’t remember very clearly, but I can’t get out of my head that Mama was yelling a lot that day, and I couldn’t breathe.”
Kyan furrowed her brow and looked again at the names on the wall.
“Mylo? Claggor? Powder?” she repeated. “Do you know those people?”
Isha shook her head.
“They must’ve been Aunt Vi’s and Mom’s friends when they were kids.”
“They were our brothers.”
Isha and Kyan jumped a little when Jinx climbed through the window that served as an entrance.
“You fixed up this place,” she exclaimed, a hint of pride in her voice. “Not bad.”
Kyan grinned proudly. Isha turned her back on them again, focusing on her little improvised lab.
“Did you have more siblings, Mom?” Kyan asked, curiosity overflowing from her eyes.
Jinx nodded with a saddened smile.
“They died when I was your age.”
Isha froze, watching her mother from the corner of her eye. Kyan pressed her lips together.
“It’s okay… it was a long time ago, in an accident.”
“Accident? With what?”
Jinx dragged her feet across the hideout, brushing her fingertips over the shooting bar where she used to compete against Mylo.
“A homemade bomb,” she murmured, barely audible, her voice so cracked that the splinters could be felt lodged in her throat. “I… miscalculated.”
Isha turned to her again, the freckles on her nose soon becoming the only color left in her face. Jinx smiled, tears filling the edges of her eyes.
“I made a lot of mistakes when I was a child, and I regret all of them,” she continued. “That’s why… I want to keep you from following that path. I know you have to learn on your own, but… I just want to keep you alive.”
Kyan’s pink eyes pooled into two small lakes, and she ran to hug her mother’s waist. Jinx looked down at her with a tender expression, a maternal smile, and stroked her blue curls. She understood her youngest daughter’s feelings; if she had had her mother at her age, she wouldn’t have left her lap for anything in the world.
Isha, meanwhile, remained where she was, troubled. She had always empathized with her mother, had always understood her pain, and now it seemed she was falling into a deep pit. Mom hid things, but not just from Isha—also from herself.
Her feelings tangled in her chest until Jinx took her hand and, still smiling as she held Kyan, brushed a thumb over her cheek.
“There are memories best left in the past,” she said. “But if you have questions about… anything, I promise I’ll answer them. Just don’t…”
Jinx clung to the hope of something Violet had once told her: that she was capable of fixing anything. Maybe her relationship with her daughter wasn’t completely broken. Not as much as it seemed—she just needed a little oil and a few gears tightened.
“I just won’t put our lives at risk.”
Isha finished, with a smile she placed into her mother’s cold palm.
“Smart girl, just like your mother.”
Bitterly, Jinx understood that life had stopped being what it once was. A new stage was about to begin. Deep down, she only wished it would be easier than the first.
When Jinx and the girls left the hideout behind, a tracker moved through the shadows and dust. She stalked the mother who’d just departed and the two children she guarded so warily at her side. She took the grenade Isha had left half-finished on the worktable and slipped it into the satchel crossing her chest.
She pulled a compass from her pocket, calmly turned the needles counterclockwise, and vanished.
Isha had begun to be a target.
But Mama was never prey.
She had always been a hunter.