Don't call me "kid"
Don't call me "baby"
Look at this godforsaken mess that you made me
You showed me colors
You know I can't see with anyone else
And you know damn well
For you, I would ruin myself
A million little times
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I'm bored. I'm bored. I'm bored I'm bored I'm bored I'm bored.
It's Vi's turn to babysit me after Caitlyn. Caitlyn whispers something as they pass each other that makes Vi furrow her eyebrows. She brought me food, and she puts it next to me and removes one of my handcuffs, and she looks like she's gonna say something, so I say, "I'm bored."
"Tough," she says, dropping onto her bed. "Eat your dinner."
I eat my dinner, but I'm still bored afterward, so I tell her again.
"Look, I'm sorry, but you're under house arrest. What do you think you're gonna be able to do for entertainment?"
"I like drawing," I say.
"What would you draw on?"
"The floor."
"What would you draw with?"
"You could see if anybody has any crayons."
"Nobody here has crayons, Jinx."
"You didn't ask yet."
She looks at me for a long time, bouncing one of her legs.
"She's gonna keep you here forever," Mylo says. (Forever forever.) "You'll never draw anything again." I tell him to shut up inside my mind so Vi doesn't know I'm seeing him. Nobody's supposed to know, but they always do. Silco told me it's okay and it doesn't make me any less special— it makes me more special. Sometimes he thought it made me weak, but I always proved him wrong.
"Then you killed him," Mylo says.
"And then you killed my family," Caitlyn says. Caitlyn isn't real. If she was, Vi would be all over her; besides, I just watched her walk out. And it isn't her family I killed, anyway. She said her mom was alive.
"It was someone's family," she says. ("Family, family, family family family family—")
"Shut up," I say. I had a family. I killed them. I don't care.
Vi opens her mouth, then follows my eyes to where Fake Caitlyn sits on the floor, swirling her shiny ribbon between her fingers. I don't know why she gave the ribbon to me. She thinks I'm evil.
"I know you're evil," she says.
"Shut up," I say.
"Nobody has crayons," Vi says again. "But I'll see if anyone has anything else that would work. Chalk or paint or something."
She leaves and calls for someone named Quartz, who comes in to grimace at me without blinking. I put my empty cup on the floor between my cot and the wall.
Vi comes back after a long time, kicks Quartz out, and drops a dirty stick of white chalk in the middle of the floor. Then she grabs the cuff she took off my right hand, puts it on one leg of the bed frame, tells me to get up, locks my ankle, and frees my left hand. I'm left kneeling with my foot pinned, but able to reach all the way across the floor.
"How's that?" she asks softly.
"Good."
I draw until the striped shadows from our cots have turned all stretchy and then gone dim from the sun getting blocked. Vi gets up at that point to put on the lanterns that are strung around the ceiling, and I can see through the cracks that some other people have put theirs on too. The light is dense and yellow. They remind me of the lanterns we had in the basement at the Last Drop.
I only have the one stick of chalk, so I've been very careful with it, and I made it so my drawings are neatly spaced and cover everywhere I can reach and there's a tiny nub left that I put in my pocket for later, just in case. Vi walks on her tippy toes in the blank spots and sits on my cot behind me.
"She's gonna kill you," Mylo says. I hold very still, thinking about Heimerdinger's windcatcher. I should have pretended I couldn't solve it and asked to keep it overnight to work on and made it into a weapon instead. It wouldn't have been an explosive, but it could've been nice and stabby.
Vi tugs a piece of my hair. I whip around and try to smack her hand, but she's already taken it back. "I'm just getting the tangles out," she says.
"You'll let her do that?" says Silco. He's sitting next to her, and he puts his hand on her cheek. "Really, now. After all she's done to you?"
"Don't touch her," I say. Vi raises her eyebrow. "Not you," I say. "Silco."
"Silco?"
"He's not real. He's in my head."
"I know, Powder."
"Jinx."
"Jinx."
"He's touching your face."
"Oh, hell," Vi mutters, and leans closer to him. It makes me laugh, which makes him disappear. I've never laughed about them before. Not when anything's actually funny.
"He's not real because you killed him," Mylo says. Claggor nods. I stop laughing. Vi looked like she was gonna smile, but she doesn't.
I look back at the floor in front of me. After a moment, there's another tug on my hair, and this time I don't react, so after another moment, I feel a third. A heart with a smiley face with buck teeth watches me. It got wobbly when I passed the chalk over a crack between the floorboards, even though usually I try to be careful with those. I was distracted.
I drew a few monkey faces too, and stars and swirls, and my name. When I draw for missions, it's to confuzzle my enemies and make sure my work lives in infamy. When I draw on my own, though, it's just because it makes me feel good. I should have drawn more confuzzling drawings today since I'm surrounded by enemies. I just really don't feel like I am.
It's okay to want to be in control. It's okay to use drastic measures for it. That never made Silco love me any less. He wanted me to do it.
"It made me love you less," Vi says.
Shut up shut up shut up. I try to shove myself forward, but my foot stays stuck, so I grab a handful of my hair and pull it away from her. "Shut up," I say, turning around, but there are two of her sitting next to each other, and one is surprised while the other is smug.
"Punch the air next to you," I tell the surprised one.
"Is Silco touching my face again?"
"No. There's a Fake Vi."
She strikes Fake Vi straight in the jaw. I fall forward onto my hands, howling with laughter.
"Did I get it?"
"You vanquished it!"
I turn back to see her admiring her fist. "There aren't gonna be any more fakes," she says. "Just tell me when you see one, and I'll kick its ass."
No monster's gonna get you when I'm here.
"Funny— I see a monster right now," Mylo says. "Not sure she can save you from this one, though."
It's always been my job to protect you. If I have to protect you from yourself, I will.
I stop laughing again, so Vi stops smiling again. Then she picks up Caitlyn's stupid ribbon and a lock of my hair.
"Can I braid it?" she asks. "Like I used to?"
She looks afraid. Not afraid in any visceral sense— I don't think she's ever seen a physical threat to herself and thought of it as a threat— but afraid like when she thought I was gonna kill Caitlyn, or when the enforcers searched our basement after I exploded the Topside apartment and she saw that I was gonna fall, or when we went to the bridge after the rebellion and she realized our parents were dead.
I think she's afraid I'll say no.
I should say no. I need to say no. Whatever she's doing, she's tricking me. Or she's as crazy as me. I'm not her little baby sister anymore. I don't want to be.
"Yeah, you do," Mylo says.
"Shut the fuck up," I say.
Vi drops her hands again. "I'm sorry."
"Not you," I say, but I say it in the same tone. I don't know what all of this is. Maybe I do mean her. Maybe everybody needs to shut up. I can't handle it. I want to go home.
"Where do you mean, daughter?" Silco says by my ear. "Where is home? Not with me. Not with Violet. You ruined both of those options. You'll ruin the next one, and the one after that."
You've caused a measure of pain that you couldn't fathom in a million years.
I cover my ears and whisper, "Do it."
"Are you talking to me?" Vi asks, also in a whisper. I nod, and she starts collecting all of my hair from around the ankle cuff and inside my shirt and where I'm sitting on it so it lays flat down my back and across the floor. "Why do you keep it like this?" she asks. "It took me twenty minutes to wash all of it yesterday. Doesn't it bother you if people step on it?"
"You stopped braiding it."
"I know. I don't—"
"I didn't want to cut off hair you had never braided." I say it with my arms crossed, feeling her parting out three sections. The broken nail on her left index finger skims across my scalp. "That was before the tea party, when I was a big dumb baby. I thought you were dead, so I thought, when it was time for my own dirt nap, I should come with something for you to braid. Just in case you wanted that."
"You thought we were gonna reunite in the afterlife?"
"When I was a big dumb baby."
Vi makes the first criss-cross in my hair and it feels like bunk beds and pillow fights and the roof when Vander woke us all up to go watch the sun rise and we pretended we weren't impressed and ran back down afterward and hid from the cold under our blankets and whispered about the colors.
"Reuniting in real life is something too," Vi says. "Probably better than waiting until we're dead."
I don't know. When I was a big dumb baby, there was a part of me that thought, if we did ever see each other again, somehow she would have forgotten everything I've done. I never planned for her to braid Jinx's hair. That wasn't a variable to consider because it wasn't a variable. It was an impossibility.
Jinx would have said no. I'm not doing a good job being her today. I just miss the tape on Vi's arms catching on pieces of my hair and the little sound she makes when she notices it happening.
It's cruel of her to do this to me when we both know we can never have what we had. It's cruel of her hold out freedom just to snatch it away. But we both know I've been starving for seven years and I'd beg at her feet for it, no matter how weak that makes me.
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Intro lyrics from "Illicit Affairs" by Taylor Swift.
i stole an idea in this from my sister @/sarahdoesclownart on instagram! she also made the cover art! pls do me a solid & check her stuff out! love u all byebye