And somebody's listening at night
With the ghosts of my friends when I pray
Asking, "Why did you let them leave
And then make me stay?"
Know my name
And all of my hideous mistakes
________________________________________________________________________________
All the Firelights and half our refugees come to Snake's reburial in the war heroes' cemetery. Jinx blew us off as the exception, going back to Jayce and Viktor's lab instead, but I shouldn't have expected her in the first place.
We have our black armbands on again, and we toss them all into the grave before the first handful of dirt. The sun shines on the façade. We feel like imposters, maybe because Caitlyn is the only Topsider in attendance and there's a small crowd of others scowling at us from the other side of the graveyard fence. But we do it, and they can't stop us.
Vi sticks close by me the whole time and almost decks a fence watcher who throws a glass bottle in my direction on our way out. I hit it with the flat side of my ax, sending broken pieces back toward him, which isn't actually smart: I could get framed as the aggressor, especially if I let Vi go after him. Luckily, the glass doesn't hit anyone, but it scares off everybody else who might've been considering following his lead.
We head back to the fort in a mass that Topsiders clear the streets for. We're taking the day off from volunteering to recuperate, a concept that disturbs a good number of my people. They're gonna have to learn how to rest and let the Pilties bear some of the brunt eventually, though, so I don't budge. Most of them start doing extra chores and playing with the kids; a dozen orchestrate a communal "camping" nap on the ground in the shade of our tree.
I stand in front of Snake's portrait. It warps my brain every time I remember that Jinx made it. She was an artist when we were kids, but she wasn't near this skilled, and she tended toward abstract anyway— plus, I figured any sense of soul-driven creativity had been shoved out by the chaos-driven kind. But this is hers. No one else took credit, and I recognize her style, and I see the care she put into every brush stroke.
I don't want it to be a long game.
"Remember when you two got Snake's bike stolen?" Vi says, appearing at my side and making me jump. For a split second I wonder if I said something out loud to get her on the subject, but I know Jinx is just always at the forefront of her mind.
"I've never felt that same sense of accomplishment I felt when we stole it back," I say. "Not even when we won the coup."
She laughs. "It was so hard to be mad at you when you came home. You thought you were such badass rebels."
"We were."
"I'm gonna help deliver air filters," she says. "If—"
"No, you're not."
She scoffs. "Enjoying that councilor power trip?"
My expression must change, because she hurriedly says, "I'm teasing, Ekko."
"Yeah. Obviously."
"C'mere."
She leads me into the tree, going past the structures so we're climbing through the branches themselves toward the roof. We find a sturdy one to perch on.
"What're we doing?" I ask.
"'Recuperating,'" says Vi. "Boss's orders."
"I have some stuff to get done—"
"You are a damn hypocrite. You know that?"
I grin. "Yeah."
"When are you gonna pick a new president?"
"I wasn't planning to," I say, suddenly a lot less amused. "Do you think I should?"
She reads my mind. "Not because you're doing bad. Because you're doing way too much, and it's gonna kill you."
There will be time for you to learn to take things sometimes, instead of just giving them.
"Have you had a day off once in seven years?" she asks.
"Does anyone in the Undercity gets days off?"
"You're dodging."
"No, I haven't had a day off. But I'd take one if I needed one. And I don't."
"Tough," she says. "Because you're not leaving till I get some info out of you."
"What info?"
"Something about Snake."
"What, just anything?"
"Something about your relationship with her."
I get the idea that I'm getting backed into a corner, but what kind of corner is beyond me. I take a couple seconds to think and realize I can't come up with anything in particular. My blood chills.
"You said you loved her," Vi says.
"Yeah, I did."
"For real?"
"What? Of course."
"Well, there was something off," she says. "There's something off with how you deal with all your friends here."
"What are you talking about?" It comes out defensive. "What's your problem?"
She leans against the tree trunk, irritatingly calm. "Tons of different shit, but we're talking about your problem."
"I don't have one."
"Nope. You've got tons of different shit too."
"Shut up, Vi."
"Spill it, Ekko."
"I don't get attached to people I love anymore. I love them like they're already gone."
She points a lazy finger gun at me. "There it is."
"And it works fine too," I add hotly. "And it's not like you don't have your own attachment issues, and I bet they're even worse—"
"Tell me about your life after the explosion," she says. "Right after. Before the Firelights."
"Huh? Why?"
"I want to know."
"Why?"
"Because I missed your entire adolescence," she says. "I hardly know a thing about what you faced in the last seven years. Tell me what it was like so I can carry it with you."
She's leaning toward me now and she looks earnest, with a hint of that type of remorseful desperation she wears around Jinx whenever things get heated. I peer down through the leaves at the miniature forms of my people.
"I don't really talk about it," I say. "Especially not in detail."
"Why not?"
"I don't know. It opens up all this stuff in my mind, and I don't have the time to go down rabbit holes and get stuck in the past when I have a commune to take care of."
"It's your day off, isn't it?" she says.
Shit.
"Fine," I say, and I tell her about the first sunrise, and the second, and the cymbals, and the waiting and the waiting and the waiting, the intoxicating denial that let me wake up and work and eat instead of curling up to die because the city had all but screamed that I didn't deserve to survive. I tell her about when I gave up on pretending, and about re-understanding that everyone I loved was gone five times a day at the most inopportune moments and having to remind myself to breathe. I tell her about Snake and Zelle and the first year we spent operating from their place, watching the fissures deteriorate under Silco and doing what we could to get the victims to relative safety, slowly collecting a messy little team that stopped being little and then stopped being messy, at least enough that we realized we could pull off something real.
"I had it in my head at first that you guys took Powder with you even though you said you wouldn't, and I was the only one you left behind. I spent a lot of time thinking about that, about why you didn't want me with you. But after a while I made myself look at it straight and obviously it wasn't that— she had to have just followed you without you knowing. You would never take her on that mission on purpose."
"No. I left thinking she was at home. If I had taken her, I would have taken you too."
"Right. So I tried to get over it by just getting that it wasn't personal, but then I started thinking I should have followed you too. That you were a rulebreaker, saying what you knew you should, expecting me to know you didn't mean it. I would play out all these scenarios of different things I could've done to save the day."
"You couldn't have done anything. You were a little kid. I told you to stay back because I wanted you to stay back."
"I started getting that as I got older. It's hard to see that you're a kid when you're a kid. At the most recent moment, that's as culpable as you've ever been for anything, so even if that's still not very culpable—"
"— it feels really goddamn culpable. Yeah."
"Firelights and Shimmer addicts and people you used to see in the streets were constantly dying during all of this," I say. "And Silco's empire was getting stronger. And then I met Jinx, and for a second I started wondering again if more of you could be alive somewhere, but gone on purpose too. I tried to shut that one down fast. I don't know. It was still there. I don't know.
"I guess— first it was my birth parents dying, and then it was Grayson and Benzo, and then it was all of you, and then it was Powder turning out to be alive and leaving anyway. When so many people disappear, even when you know you didn't do anything directly, you start thinking some part of you has to be involved in some way. You're part of some kind of curse, maybe. It's too many coincidences."
Vi scowls at her swinging feet. The grilles on her boots fling reflected sunlight across the leaves and into my eyes.
"I had so much to do all the time," I say, turning the other way. "It wasn't that hard to just keep myself a little bit away from everybody so I wouldn't get thrown off track if I lost them. And so I'd know for sure that it was nothing to do with me. That's why I act 'off' with my friends."
I feel her look in my direction and the flashes of light stop. There's an impulse waiting at my fingertips that could have me safely behind my closed bedroom door in seconds, except that there's another impulse forcing me to stay. It's winning for now.
"I don't know what to say to you," Vi says.
I squirm. "You don't have to."
"I know Powder's the one I have all the complexes about," she says. "Because she's the one I hurt and the one who— did all the horrible stuff she did. But I didn't forget about you."
"No, I know."
"I was gonna come back," she says. "When I said I was, I really thought I was. And when I woke up on the boat to Stillwater, I was hoping she'd go back, and I was gonna escape somehow and I had this plan about how me and you and her would stay together and figure it out— but I tried a hundred times and I never pulled it off."
"I doubt anyone can escape Stillwater by themselves."
She scoffs quietly. "I thought about you. How you were waiting for me. If Powder didn't get home, no one would tell you what happened. You'd never know. You'd have to survive all on your own. If she did get back, it was still just the two of you, two kids, and you'd have to survive on your own. I thought about that."
I did all of this without you.
"You didn't go down the same path as Powder," she says. "You stayed true to yourself and created so many insanely amazing things, and now you're this wise-beyond-your-years, down-to-earth, won-a-revolution society/tech prodigy, and you look like you just— fought all the way through it. Moved on."
I bite my tongue. She was probably the one person I thought might get it if I told her.
"Yeah," I say. "It's— in the past."
"Oh, fuck off," she says. I glance back at her in surprise. "Maybe you look cool, but you went through damn near the same thing as the girl who became a terrorist. Just because you coped with it good doesn't mean it didn't still happen.
"Everyone wants to look the other way. You want to look the other way. But I fought with you about your coup and didn't write a note when I ran an errand, and you took that to mean I had left you forever. So clearly something's still there. It's not inspiring or telling that you found a good way to ignore it— it just sucks that a child had something like that happen to them that they had to find a good way to ignore. That's a shit card."
Real shitty card, huh?
She does get it.
"You're not a curse," she says.
"No, I know. I don't actually think that."
"Except when you do."
"Well... yeah."
"Well, you should tell me," she says. "Tell me when you start thinking dumb shit like that and I'll knock some sense into you."
I laugh, and we watch the fluttering leaves for a second. She starts flinging light around again.
You're not a curse.
"You know I love you," she says. "Right?"
I look at her fast, then away from her faster. "Right. I— right."
"Did you not know?"
I thought I did. We don't say it in words very often on this side of the river— I don't know about Topside, but something about the constant fighting and starving and waiting to get caught for one thing or another turns trenchers soft in a hard way. We'll take bullets for each other and adopt strangers' children without thinking twice, but we find it difficult to talk. Back before everything, Vi told me she loved me by hugging me, teasing me, throwing stuff at me or pushing me into stuff, and showing me how to injure people. I heard the actual words maybe three times. But I know I knew it then.
"It's just that it's been a really long time since we knew each other," I say, "and I grew up a lot, and changed a lot, and I've done a lot of things, and I stand up to you more than—"
She claps a hand down on our branch. "Ekko, how many times am I gonna have to explain to you that I don't care if you stand up to me? How much was I power-tripping when we were kids to make you so obsessed?"
As soon as you left Powder alone, this became inevitable.
"It's not you." My eyes sting. "It's— just— what if I make a really terrible decision as a councilor that hurts a ton of people?"
She's confused. "Then you'd probably fix it."
"What if I can't fix it?"
"Then you'd do what you could."
"What if I don't ever forgive Jinx?"
She furrows her eyebrows and moves closer. "What are you trying to talk about right now?"
"I'm just saying— it might be harder to love me now than it was before."
Her expression goes blank.
"I still have so much to do all the time," I say, dropping my gaze. I'm breathing too fast, like I always do when I let myself think of those first days. "Like I said, if I attach to someone and lose them, it throws everything off, and I don't want—"
Vi pulls me into a hug so aggressive that I think the imbalance is gonna send us crashing to the ground. As soon as I catch my breath, I see the blue light and taste the smoke and go back to hyperventilating, and she redoubles her grip and makes the whole thing happen again.
"So what?" she says. "So what about any of that? We've all changed. We had to. You think you make really terrible decisions? You'll never beat mine. Or Powder's."
"It just has to be bad enough to—"
"It's never gonna be bad enough."
"We always fight."
"God, you're dramatic." She tugs on a lock of my hair. "'Always'? We could fight every day and it would never be bad enough. So you grew up and got smart— you think I didn't know that would happen at some point? I like how you turned out. It's good to have you to reign in my stupidity."
You're the one babysitting me now. Never thought I'd see the day.
I bite my tongue again. "Thanks for not being dead."
She snorts. "I can't promise that one forever, you know."
I used to think you were invincible. I keep catching myself thinking it again even though I know it's not true.
It's funny how fast that changed when I witnessed her Shimmer poisoning, and how much I didn't mind. I don't need an idol anymore. I just need Vi.
"I can promise it's the only reason I'll ever leave," she says. "Either I'm dead or in prison again."
I half-laugh.
"I just got you back," she says. "Why would I throw that away? You're my brother. My little man. Nothing's ever going to make it harder to love you."
I'm the one who unbalances us this time by trying to push closer. We yelp.
"Fuck Topside," she says. "Snake should still be alive. You should have gotten to love her without always being on defense."
"I don't want to do it anymore." I click my heels together, restless. "I don't want to be on defense with the others. That was— honestly, it wasn't even all Topside. It was me. I don't want to be the reason I'm locked up behind walls."
"Okay," she says. "Then don't be. I'm sure they want to know you."
I pull away and look down through the leaves at all of them again and, for one more second, she's the omniscient deity us kids always saw her as. Then she adds, "I'm sorry. About sunrise."
Her voice falters. I look back at her, caught off guard, and she turns the other way and presses her fists against her eyes.
You're my brother. My little man.
I'm careful not to let us fall when I hug her again. "It's all right," I say. "I love you too."
________________________________________________________________________________
Intro lyrics from "Rejoice" by Julien Baker.
Ekko and Vi's relationship is EVERYTHING to me you don't UNDERSTAND—