Work Text:
The stool creaks and squeaks as he spins around, drinking in the familiar décor of the Last Drop. Oh, there is probably a million ways in which it differs from the bar Ekko knew, but it has been nearly a decade now since he last set foot inside the bar. He never went back; even when there was no one left to defend it—what for?—that mad neon eye still loomed over the doorstep and that was enough to drive Ekko away.
He pauses in his motion to look at one of the sheets of paper left laying around, at risk of getting coffee or beer splashed on them. This one is hand-written, whereas the others are clearly typeset, but what really caught his eye, were little blue scribbles in one corner, and he feels the corner of his lips twitch upward in recognition. He remembers when Powder used to doodle on whatever she could get her hands on as they huddled under the table in Benzo’s back room. The man would come in, start chastising them for “dephasing the goods”, and they would scurry away, ribbing each other, laughing all the while.
Ekko turns the page around a bit, craning his neck to piece out the actual text. It’s clearly not Powder’s handwriting: the words aren’t scrawling randomly across half the page, instead neatly-packed in orderly rows—all in angular strokes, slightly tilted as if the author thought it could make their hand slides across the paper faster.
The first few sentences are dry, interspersed a few numbers—something about trade and, Ekko thinks he recognizes the name of one of the Councilors from his timeline—but then there is a stroke bisecting the page and the rest seems to be notes of a different kind. It piques Ekko’s curiosity and soon he is finding himself reading through what seems to be a summary of… he would call it a history book, if he lived in Piltover perhaps, and if it was talking about of any place but Zaun. There is no history book about Zaun—it’s known as the Undercity, an extension of Topside, to it both a source of wealth and a threat, but certainly nothing else, nothing more. That’s how it goes—even in this universe, until very recently if he had to trust Powder’s explanations, it wasn’t any different.
Yet… now, he’s reading about a—“city” is scribbled out, and “nation” is written in its place—a nation which rose from the ashes of Osha Va’Zaun, that sunk down the canyon centuries ago, and built ladders of iron and glass until they reached the sun again. From there, people settled on the surface, as if nothing happened. They named themselves “Piltover”—(the flowy tail of the -r is but an annoyed scratch across the page)—and turned up their noses at the fissures they only just crawled out from. The very ingenuity, ardor, vitality, that hoisted them up from the very bottom, now scared them, so they elected to try and erase it.
Up there, there is order and peace, all decked out in white and gold, bathed in light—the kind of life that needs to be enforced. (The word is outlined. Then, scribbled underneath, in between two lines: “that needs enforcers to protect?”) But Zaun endures. Its sons and daughters survived the mines, worming their way through the bedrock with blood, sweat, and tears, releasing poison into the air to fill up the coffers of far-off Piltovan dignitaries. They survived the polluted water and the too-thin air, the poisonous Gray perpetuating its every cranny up until a Councilor upside decided that fissure-folks too “deserved to breathe”—(“quoted from Piltover Archives”, adds a foot note). They kept their heads up, proud despite it all of the chaotic beauty of their nation. They believed that, one day, we would be able to build our own—
The nib of the pen has slid across the paper, leaving an ink blot, as if the author had been startled. The following sentence is spelled out more slowly, pointedly, leaving slight creases in the paper: Vander says it’s not supposed to read as a manifesto.
The corner of Ekko’s lips quirks up. Yeah, it seemed partial—less the dry prose fit for a history book, alright, and more something that would make a good rally speech. He thinks a Firelight could have written such a blurb, if only they had known about that old city they borrowed part of the name of. He’s intrigued by this idea—the fact, even, that they were there before Piltover, instead of being nothing but their rundown. He keeps reading.
In 967 AN, Councilor Kiramman—(“graciously” is crossed out)—persuaded the Council to approve the construction of a ventilation system. It followed a deadly firedamp explosion, a tragedy that should have been avoided, and the subsequent weeks-long miner strike that deprived their precious manufactures of raw materials. That mattered more than the bones of good men and women, broken down under the rock or picked clean by— (The rest of the sentence is scribbled out, harshly enough that the pen has pierced through the page. Then, more carefully, and following a bullet point:) How palatable should history be?
If life hadn’t taught him to stay on his guard, Ekko doesn’t think he would have heard the soft footsteps coming in. He doesn’t think that they belong to J… Powder, who would have swept down the stairs just as she ran up, promising to be back in a flash—but Ekko finds himself turning with the tiniest thrill of anticipation nonetheless.
It dies down just as abruptly as a blown out candle.
“Waiting for Powder, are you?”
For all that the freaky orange eye is gone, Silco’s voice alone is still enough to make Ekko grit his teeth.
“Yes.”
He pushes off with his foot against the bar, making his stool swivel until he’s facing the open floor of the Last Drop. It’s closed—it’s still too early in the morning for clients to come trickling in, looking for a coffee or perhaps even the first beer of the day, before everyone piles in during lunch break.
Ekko spares a glance over his shoulder, peeved to find that Silco seems intent to stay. He has pulled out an empty cup, though he seems to have immediately forgotten about it and is now gathering the papers strewn about on the counter top.
“You don’t like me much, do you?”
Odd attempt to strike up conversation. Ekko’s foot taps against the stool—rubber on hollow metal, echoing. He has turned around—best to keep the man in his line of sight.
“Something to do with how things are in your universe?”
“You could say that.”
Ekko’s eyes follow idly the page with the not-manifesto, the one he was reading, as it gets put on the top of the pile. It strikes him suddenly, when he sees Silco take a pen out from his vest pocket to jot down an annotation in the margin, that the penmanship is his—and the words… the words even more so. Jinx did say that this world’s utopia, as he described it, had been Silco’s dream. He did not believe her fully. He still… doesn’t. But it fits this version of the man a little more, he thinks.
“You were angry to see me,” Silco continues—tone light, matter-of- fact. “The night before the science fair… I did not understand, then. At first I only thought that you considered me late to the party, or perhaps that one of the kids had complained that I had spurned them away when I was working, and you were righteously peeved on your friend’s behalf. Then, you spoke of murder.”
Ekko shifts uneasily on his seat.
“You… remember that.”
“Of course. Most people are tactful enough not to mention it.”
There is a short lapse of silence. Silco’s gaze doesn’t stray from his papers as he starts putting them in order, before he adds, still not looking up: “You were not addressing me, though. You were speaking to Vander.”
“Gonna stop you right there. I don’t think you want to hear that story.”
“And what if I do?”
Ekko considers for a very brief second, and then drops: “You killed him. Vander, but Benzo also, and– and the boys, Mylo and Claggor. Not directly, of course: you had people do it. It was the day after they—Vi and all—they went on that heist Topside.”
A small part of him likes the shock on this Silco’s face. It’s all the easiest to read, what with his weird… this weird openness—the lack of make-up, dark scarring fully visible, and the shirt not fully buttoned up, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. There is a scar, short and wide, running across the inside of one wrist. It’s visible when he reaches for his discarded cup, remembers that it’s empty, and starts fidgeting with it instead, his thumb rubbing across its rim tersely. His nails scratch against the smooth surface, a nasty screech that startles them both.
At least one version of him should feel guilt for what happened that night, Ekko thinks.
“Did I.. truly order Vander’s death? Or was it an accident”
“You got people to drag him to your lair, chained up, but then you stabbed him yourself. In the back. For the first strike. He could have killed you, of course, but in the end he chose to save Vi.”
“Vi?” His brow furrow slightly. “Violet…?”
“Ah, right. She survived in my universe. Might be the only good thing that differs between here and there.”
Mismatched eyes flit toward the stairs on the side of the counter. Right, Powder’s still up there, getting her things and herself ready for a trip down the Undercity for parts. Ekko bites the inside of his cheek—hoping she hurries up, although he doesn’t want her to catch wind of this conversation he finds himself having. He did not plan to tell her about her sister, not directly, but—
“Does she know?”
“About Vi? Yeah. She guessed.”
The smile that pulls the corner of Silco’s lips is tense.
“Of course. She can be too bright for her own good, can’t she?”
The tone rubs Ekko wrong. He knows even Jinx considers their universe’s Silco to be her father, same way Vander was—and for roughly as long, in the end, before she put a definitive stop to it. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t feel wrong, still.
“You’re changing the subject,” he says. “What, you are just going to brush to the side what I said?” All he gets in answer is a slight shrug, as Silco lets go of the cup and turns back to the pile of paper, on the counter in-between them. Ekko shakes his head. “You don’t believe me.”
“Oh, no, I do. There is a monster in all of us, after all. I’m sorry, but not surprised, to hear that, in other circumstances, it could have ended this way.”
Ekko stands up sharply, the stool rasping against the floorboards as he pushes it back. Silco’s gaze snaps back to him, his posture shifting slightly—defensive, suddenly.
“How can you be so– so fucking detached about this? It’s not like we are speaking in hypotheticals here. It’s not speaking about other people—it’s about you. Do you see yourself killing–”
He cuts himself short, because the way Silco is staring at him now—expression closed-off, his jaw clenched tightly, mismatched eyes narrowed—it’s a flashback to the only time he ever saw the man close enough, in his universe, that he could have spit in his face would he not have been wearing his mask. It’s the same kind of look, cold yet fiery, even without the orange eye—a threat, not backed out by weapons or physical strength, but scary all the same in its intensity. Ekko inches back, swallowing the saliva pooling in his mouth. He refuses to let himself be intimated.
When Silco breaks eye contact, gathering the papers in his hands and taping the bottom of the pile to the counter to align them, Ekko instead leans forward.
“So what, you are part of this family, and still you might kill them one day if it benefits you?”
“Well. I’m part of this family, and I’m married to a man who tried to kill me when I got in his way. Two-way street, um?”
He looks up briefly, mismatched eyes meeting Ekko’s, before his attention shifts back down. He starts thumbing through the now-orderly pile of papers, checking the pagination.
“Nothing to retort to that? I thought that you had put it together by now, since you were quick to understand that whatever went down in your universe, after the kids’ heist on Piltover, it did not happen here. That, or Powder would have told you.” He hums quietly, and the next words seems more for himself than Ekko: “We never explicitly told your alternate self what happened between Vander and I, but he never asked so we figured the rest of the kids had. Perhaps we…”
Then, his cadence slows to a halt, an odd expression crossing across his face. His hands still, too.
“Did it happen too, in your world? Did Vander try to…”
He doesn’t finish that sentence either. Still, Ekko finds himself reluctantly nodding.
“She, er, the version of… Powder—” He doesn’t want to call her Jinx, not here. He doesn’t want to explain that. “—from my universe. She told me of how Vander tried to drown you. Did that, to your eye. Something close enough, at least. Except for him, the eye went all… freaky. Black sclera, bioluminescent iris, like a—like those deep fishes that sometimes wash ashore.”
“Oh, I had that too. This one’s glass,” he adds as Ekko squints, confused—and he taps on the eye with a nail, a gesture that isn’t made any less disturbing by the revelation. “I have people here to watch over my blind spots, you see.”
Ekko is saved from having to formulate a response to that by the ruckus of boots hurrying down the stairs, the clanking of metal against metal a counterpoint to that. Powder leaps over the last few steps, the momentum carrying her up to Ekko’s sides, who gets up from his stool, hands outstretched in between them both as if to catch Powder if she lost her balance, or maybe if she just tried to touch him. She’s slightly breathless, her blue hair wild, and the satchel at her hip doesn’t close fully over the contraption she has shoved into it.
“Sorry!” She pushes away the strands of hair curling over her cheeks, then, as she reaches for the ties at her wrists and start putting it up into her usual twin buns, adds: “I couldn’t find my dosimeter! Slippery little thing had slipped under my winter jacket, can you believe it?”
The three of them—Powder and the two Ekkos—had found out earlier that the Arcane crystals seemed to react to alloys with ionizing compounds and, fearing an unpredictable side-effect, had decided to search for stabler components to rebuild parts of their aspiring portal. So, the dosimeter is rather the main thing they need for today’s errands.
“Ah,” Powder carries on, “I see you had company during the wait, though. Bye, dad! Be back for dinner. Er, hopefully?
“If you see Sevika out there, can you tell her to drop by?” Silco asks, then: “Where are you heading to, exactly?”
“To the Sump!”
That gets her a raised eyebrow from Silco. Unless it’s merely surprise, and the scarred half of his face just cannot emote this way.
“I see. Be careful, young lady.”
She bumps Ekko’s shoulder, readjusting the strap over her shoulder with her other hand as she sets out toward the entrance of the Last Drop.
“I’ve got my savior right there, what could happen to us?”
Ekko grimaces for himself, refraining from saying just how quickly he has learned that things can all go to shit. He glances back to Silco, who has finally stepped away from his papers to fill his coffee cup, and reflects again on how, in one evening, it all came crashing down, and it wasn’t even what the man wanted as Ekko has believed for so long. Why did it took them so long—too long, mostly, and up until the very brink of it, for the lucky ones—to realize that the cycle of violence could be stopped?
Last time this blue-haired girl called him a “savior”, he nearly killed her, and she thought for the longest time that she had succeeded in returning the favor.
He doesn’t protest, though, when Powder takes hold of his wrist to urge him along faster. The door, that achingly familiar wrought iron and thick green glass, squeaks on its hinges when she pushes it open with her boot.
Outside the Last Drop, taking in a breath that feels light and full at the same time, settling in his lungs without the usual pin-prick feeling brought by the Gray, Ekko wonders what went wrong, in his universe, that they couldn’t get that. Sure, the tree in the commune provided enough clear air for the Firelights and the refugees they took in, but what about the whole of Zaun? His efforts provided people with an enclave, but in the wake of Silco’s death, the spikes in violence from turf wars and enforcer strikes alike, plus the Kiramman girl blowing off poison in the streets, from the ventilation system of all things—insult to injury—it had all pushed toward their commune more distress that they could hope to ever handle.
It’s not enough.
It never has been. Ekko had just been deluding himself into thinking that it was, because he couldn’t see how things could be better. Trapped between rock and a hard place, it was all the Firelights could do to juggle the pollution and the lack of resources with one hand, while doing their best to fight Silco’s drug empire with the other, and it would have taken a third hand to try and push back against Topside’s greed and brutality too.
It was a reprieve, like what Vander had carved out for himself, his kids, and the Lanes, for a few precious years. It was marvelous, but it couldn’t have been anything else than temporary. The moment Silco’s monsters, powered by his money and Shimmer, stopped holding the line against enforcers, preventing them from sweeping into the Undercity, they would have found the tree, the Firelight commune, and like everything else, they would have crushed it down underneath the golden-toed boots.
Even Talis, for all his good intentions, when he built his miraculous Hexgates, did not pause to think that if they failed, they would destroy most of the pumps and water pipes going into the Undercity. The anomaly Piltover’s hubris bred for its own glory ended up poisoning their sister city, as their progress always did.
Ekko thinks that, now, he might have to have a chat with this version of Sevika, now that in his world she has been appointed a seat at the Piltovan Council. It’s a pitiful substitute for independence, but it’s a first step in the right direction, if they manage to keep pushing.
Likewise, he’d better get over his distrust for Silco, at least with this version of him. The thought makes him grimace, but he needs to understand what got this world a free Zaun, cleaner, richer, prouder, and yet still unabashedly herself in all her glory—all asymmetric fashion, spray-painted murals, and wrought-iron, lit up in a dizzying array of colorful neon light. He wants to see if he can understand the vision Silco got for their nation, both in this world, and in theirs, if Jinx is to be believed—maybe then, if he could take the parts of it that haven’t been infected by the bitterness that Vander’s betrayal had spread all over his worldview… then, he could carry it over for when he will eventually get back to his own timeline.
This one—this utopic, almost unbelievable, happy world—it made him realize once already that, apart from the souls the Kindreds had claimed as theirs, there was no such thing as “too late”. Oh, sure, it won’t be the same; rewinding time was a once-in-a-lifetime miracle. But even on top of ruins, one can rebuild. As their nation rose from the ashes of a city-ending catastrophe, merely discarding the first three syllables of its old name as it did—"Osha Va’Zaun” morphing into the simpler “Zaun”, punchy and straight to the point, ah, fitting—then perhaps he and the surviving Firelights can find the way to transform it again in the wake of the Arcane war.
He watches, smiling, as Powder searches through the scrapyard, beeping dosimeter in hand, her face scrunched up in a focused frown as her eyes dart around, searching for suitable parts. Next time—if there is a next time, he would like to have good news to tell her about the state of his world. It would be partly thanks to her. And his version of her—his Jinx—she might still come back, and if she does, when she does, he wants to show her a dream turned reality. Like they used to talk about, as kids, right? speeding around on the monowheel they build until they found a quiet enough corner to enjoy pilfered leftovers from Jericho, trading stories, screws, and bolts.
If it could be done there, then there might be hope for his world yet.