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At the beginning of it all there is a stranger, cloaked in blue, the devil’s crown upon her head in the shape of an enforcer’s cap. She sticks out like a sword in a haystack — trimmed, manicured nails, clean cuticles. Smooth, sharp trim to her bangs. The tanned leather she has strapped around her thigh and strung over her shoulder is oiled with an almost silk-like sheen, and the rifle she has is equally well-kept, glistening as if unused.
Jinx notices all of this. The enforcer that keeps at Vi’s side is not just any enforcer; she is nobility, shrouded and fed with gold and clean things. Worst of all, even though she’s out of place in the Lanes, she looks right at home next to Vi. It’s sickening, really, the two of them, like two fucked up pieces in a fucked up puzzle, fitting together in haphazard yet perfect ways next to each other. There was something Shakespearean about them. Something awful. Something pure, unruined, unbroken.
-
Jinx is ten minutes away from the Kiramann estate when Caitlyn rouses. Still bound to her rope, she grunts and struggles in the wheelchair before Jinx rattles the handles of it, jostling Caitlyn’s body in the seat.
“You’re awake!” Jinx cheers. Then sobers. “Not for long though.”
“What are you doing,” Caitlyn says, voice trembling with something cliched between fear and anger. Desperation, maybe. It tickles her.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Jinx dismisses. “I’m not going to kill you. I’m taking you on a little trip to see my sister. Say, are you two dating or am I going crazy?” Then she laughs. “The Vi I know would never talk to an enforcer, much less date one. She hated them! And now look at you! Aren’t you special?”
Caitlyn is silent for a few seconds before gritting out, “We’re not dating. We don’t have any kind of relationship.”
A fury shoots right through Jinx’s fingers as her grip tightens around the handles and her vision goes white and neon for a few hazy seconds, and the next thing she feels is her hand around Caitlyn’s neck, grabbing her windpipe and feeling the quickened pulse against her palm, her throat seizing like a dying bird in Jinx’s grip. Then Jinx blinks and pulls her hand away. “I really, really don’t like it when people lie to me, Caitlyn. Or should I say Cupcake? That’s what my sister calls you, isn’t it? It has a nice ring to it. Cupcake.” Jinx giggles. “Cupcake.”
“Don’t call me that,” Caitlyn croaks out, shuddering. “I’m not lying—”
Jinx grabs the pistol from her belt and slams it against Caitlyn’s temple. Her body goes limp.
“Caitlyn,” she coos to the unconscious, almost-lifeless body. “Cupcake. My sister would be so heartbroken if she knew that you didn’t think that there was anything between you two, you know? Don’t break my sister’s heart, okay?”
For good measure, she cocks the gun at Caitlyn’s head the entire trip down to the Lanes.
-
Love: a funny thing. It takes many forms. Every single one Jinx had was torn out of her like botched surgery. A brutal desecration of her memory, the ghosts of the love she used to have in her life haunting her still as if she is a graveyard herself, a collection of bodies aflame at the mausoleum of her hands.
Vi, well. She was the same. At least she should have been. But now she has this. A girl from the topside, untouched by the hurt from below. A new kind of love. A love worth leaving everything behind for. And Vi’s changed. She’ll never love Jinx the same again, no matter how much she wants her to. After all, Vi loves Powder, a sweet, wide-eyed girl worth protecting, not the person she is today. A killer. A criminal. A daughter to a man who killed the father they used to share.
Here’s to the new us, Jinx had said. What she didn’t say was, here’s to the new you — the one who has a love to live for, and the me who killed every last love I had except for you.
-
The next time she sees them, Vi is an enforcer too. She doesn’t have on the uniform — Jinx knows that despite it all, Vi still hates those hideous things — but she has the badge pinned right at her chest. And of course, right next to her is Caitlyn with her stupid ugly tophat.
“P— Jinx,” Vi says, catching herself. The air is sweet with the smells of gasoline and smoke from the burning bureau building, and the shrapnel of Jinx’s bombs are littered across the floor. “What are you doing?”
“Arson,” Jinx deadpans. “Obviously.”
“Why?” Vi begs, taking one step closer. Jinx steps back reflexively, but something in her falters at the look on her sister’s face. “Silco… Zaun is free now, so why?”
“She’s insane,” Caitlyn hisses. “Obviously.”
Jinx giggles. Tosses one of her braids over her shoulder. Shrugs. “I’m bored.”
“Caitlyn,” Vi sighs exasperatedly. “We’ve been over this, you can’t just call her insane. She’s my sister."
“I am insane,” Jinx provides helpfully. “Cupcake isn’t wrong.”
Both Vi and Caitlyn’s jaws drop in slack, delightful horror. “Please don’t call her that,” Vi says.
“Why? Can’t I have a little fun around here?” Jinx laughs, spreading her arms out and spinning around the room, still lit aflame by the explosions. “It would be so fun if we played a little game. Cat and mouse. You can chase me around town! It’ll be fun. I really am bored, you know.”
Jinx knows that’s only half of the truth. Jinx is bored without Silco and his plans to rule the undercity; Ekko’s plans are much more peaceful and stable, and frankly far too bland for Jinx’s tastes. Really though, the secret: Jinx misses Vi. And they’re so different now, living in two different cities, and how else is Jinx supposed to get her sister’s attention? Come over for tea at the Kiramann’s? How disgusting.
“We can get you help,” Vi tries again, pleading again as her voice breaks. “I know what they did to you, you were experimented on, and you’re not okay, Pow— Jinx, we can get you help. You don’t have to do this.”
A piece of the ceiling crashes down onto the floor with a deafening thud.
“And you,” Jinx hisses, rage suddenly roaring inside her in a burst of waves, “don’t have to be a fucking pig, Vi, and join the fucking cops that killed our parents, you know, but we can’t have it all, sister!” She cocks her minigun at her side with a screech. “You want to lock me up in a looney bin? Catch me first, assholes!”
And she begins firing. The bullets ricochet in pink light against the crumbling wall and punches holes through the building, and Caitlyn immediately ducks for cover. Jinx’s eyes snap to the line of Caitlyn’s arm reaching out and grabbing for Vi’s wrist, fingers curling around the bone, and how she tugs urgently and gently for Vi to get out of range of fire.
How sweet, Jinx thinks. Then, We’ve been over this. She’s my sister. She’s my sister.
She reloads the gun and smiles.
-
Jinx crouches in the branches of a tree looking into the restaurant that Vi and Caitlyn are eating at, a no-frills dive bar with the works — beer, fries, greasy food that Vi always took a liking to. It’s just the kind of place that Jinx imagined Vi to drag Caitlyn kicking and screaming to. But through the binoculars, Jinx peers at Caitlyn chugging a pint down and slamming it back on the table, waving the bartender over for another, and then stuffing her face with a handful of roasted peanuts.
“Huh,” Jinx says. “Maybe not such a nice girl after all.”
She watches as Vi slaps Caitlyn right on the back as she chugs down another. Lifting the radio to her ear, Jinx listens in through the recording playback device she planted under the bar:
“Didn’t know you could pound ‘em back like that, Cupcake.”
“You learn what you must on the job. Can’t say it’s one of my more refined traits.”
A snort. “No. You don’t have a lot of those besides your posh accent. Where’d all your manners go, anyway?”
“Threw the training my mother gave me out the window when I joined the enforcers.”
“Mommy issues, huh? You know, I was old enough to remember my mom when she died, but I don’t think Powder has much memory of either of our parents. Er, I mean Jinx. It’s still hard remembering that. I still think of her as my little sister. The little girl in my memories.”
“She’s different now. You know that. She knows that, and she said it herself.”
A heavy sigh from Vi. “I know, I know. And I get it. I respect that she wants to be Jinx. The time with Silco really changed her. That night changed her. It changed me too, and then we were separated for ten years. We were never going to go back to being the same sisters, even if both of us wanted it.”
“Vi…”
“I know Pow-Pow isn’t there anymore. But we’re always going to be sisters, you know? I always want to be. I just don’t know how to fix this, Cait. It’s going to be hard. Especially if she really does want to fuck up the city and run around playing this game. I want us to be normal sisters, but not the old normal with Powder. I want us to make a new normal, with Jinx. I want her to get help.”
“I know, Violet. Hey. It’s okay. You’ll figure it out. We’ll figure it out. You’ll mend your relationship with her, I know you will.”
Jinx wrenches the binoculars and the radio away just as Caitlyn reaches over to stroke Vi’s cheek. Curling in the little nook of the tree just a few yards away from the bar, Jinx begins to cry.
-
When Caitlyn swings open the door to her flat, bleary-eyed and half-asleep, Jinx presents her with a large cupcake dripping in pink frosting. Caitlyn, to her credit, does not scream, but she does gasp and frantically fumble at her hip for her gun holster before realizing that she’s in her nightgown and essentially defenseless.
“Hi,” Jinx says.
“Jinx,” Caitlyn says slowly. “What did you—”
“There isn’t a bomb in the cupcake, you can relax.”
Caitlyn’s at a loss for words, spluttering and scanning Jinx’s body — for weapons or explosives, probably, but upon realizing that she didn’t have her usual arsenal with her, she narrows her eyes. “What are you—”
Jinx doesn’t have time for stupid questions. “Do you love my sister?”
Caitlyn flushes bright red before stuttering yet again, which is getting really annoying, actually, so Jinx shoves the cupcake into Caitlyn’s hands before repeating, “Do you love my sister?”
“I—” Caitlyn looks down, then back up. “Yes, I do.”
Love, see, comes in many forms. Sometimes it’s between a topsider enforcer born into nobility and a trencher who spent a decade in prison with a list of bodies to her name. Sometimes it’s between two fucked up sisters who don’t know how to care for each other anymore. Jinx sighs and steps back. “Okay.”
Caitlyn blinks, as if asking is that it? And then she asks: “... Do you?”
Vi, hauling her up over the ledge. Vi, stitching together a stuffed bunny from scraps in the trash and fabric from her shirt. Vi, saving her the best parts of the fish at the stall then picking the leftover meat off the bones she left. Vi, who left her broken at the bodies of their brothers and father, Vi who abandoned her for ten years, Vi who said yes, we are still sisters, nothing could ever, possibly change that, and in every world and galaxy we come across I will still try my hardest to love you and care for you and build you up when you’re broken, and sometimes I will fail, and I’m sorry, but we are still sisters, Powder. We always will be.
Jinx asks back, “What kind of question is that?”
-
Here’s to the new us. Broken, beaten down, but still — and always still — bound by a love furiously tested, scorched and reforged.