Work Text:
i.
At some point when they’re growing up, most children in the Lanes play Enforcers.
Enforcers is an extremely simple game with extremely uncomplicated rules. Kids split themselves up into teams of Enforcers and felons on the run. Felons have to avoid being tagged and arrested. The Enforcers can do whatever they want in order to tag them. The Enforcers win when they catch and subdue the felons. The felons don’t have a win condition, they just play.
When they’re playing any game Vi usually plays the role of the monster, but Powder would let Vi pick any role she wanted because Powder’s afraid Vi will get too bored of her to keep playing. Vi doesn’t show it but it must be annoying being the kid that has to watch her baby sister all the time. And anyways, Vi’s bigger and stronger. Powder wouldn’t have any idea what to do with power over Vi.
Powder loves Vi. Vi’s her savior and protector. Vi’s her only remaining parent, more than Vander is, even though Vi is Vander’s favorite and Powder gets why. Vi is a fighter. Vi is a really good fighter. Vi gets carried away sometimes — in the heat of the moment high on emotions and experimentation and the high of her body — and Vi gets carried away during games too. But it’s okay. Powder loves Vi even when she’s scared of her.
(Powder isn’t always the best at telling fiction apart from reality. She gets in her own head. She covers her ears. She’s a bad playmate.)
One day Powder makes a bad decision and tries to hide in a corner from Vi. But Vi hears her or sees her or Powder gives off a bright blue beacon that Vi will always follow — and catches the corner and tracks her down in it.
She’s down. Powder squeaks.
The really good kids have a pair of handcuffs to play with and Vander’s kids have one now, which they’ll later start to get bored with and Powder will accidentally lose while carrying it somewhere precarious. Powder holds her hands out — You caught me! — and Vi doesn’t grab her immediately. That’s fine. Vi likes to drag it out. Vi likes to make it fun for her, and anyway — Vi likes the fight.
Vi plays like the boys sometimes, which means she’s a little rough and a little pushy with Powder. Powder avoids playing with the boys when she can. Vi plays with boys as often as possible and sometimes boys are better at keeping up with her than Powder is, although Mylo’s secretly a coward and Claggor is too polite and Ekko is Powder’s size.
Vi growls and falls on her and tickles her and Powder squeals and kicks. She’s trapped under a desk, so there’s nowhere to go; she’s walled in on all sides and all she can do is push backwards. She’s completely out of breath when Vi cuffs her — and then — she gets a little rougher. Shoves her back and talks her down. “Do you know why I’ve stopped you?” to “You’re going to be in a lot of trouble, you little punk!” and her hands go up and down Powder’s body — and. And. It’s different and stranger. Vi’s hands press up under her neck, lightly, like she’s going to choke her; Vi has choked her for real, a tiny bit, only lightly and only on a dare and only when they were so young they didn’t know any better; she presses over her chest, where she flattens her further against the wall; presses on her tummy. Powder feels a little like maybe she’s going to pee on accident and then —
— and then she goes out of her head all at once. Something’s happening to her brain and something else takes over and her body goes limp and rigid and far away. Vi has her way terrorizing her a little more but it’s a game and a game is supposed to involve two of them and eventually she asks “Powder?” and then ”Powder?” and shakes her a little and Powder, lolling, tries to come back to herself but struggles. When Vi asks her what’s wrong she doesn’t have anything to say. She wouldn’t know how to explain if she tried.
Vi frees her and stops for the day and, still looking a bit guilty, brings her a root beer float at the bar later. Powder knows that it’s not real. It’s not real.
Vi plays the Enforcer again next time.
ii.
Years after the last time she sees Vi and years before she sees Vi for the first time again Jinx is pulled over by an enforcer while she’s walking down the street.
Enforcers almost never come to the Black Lanes in uniform, but this one is mild, relaxed, off-duty, and anyway she wants them all to know she isn’t scared of them, so she’d swept right past when suddenly she’d gotten the shoulder-grab and the —
“Hey. You.”
— and she knows what that means, normally, except it turns out she doesn’t this time.
He stops her for streetwalking and it doesn’t matter that she isn’t. Her waistlines have climbed lower and her hemlines higher recently and she gets the looks and the catcalls and she likes the attention, honestly, and she’s sure the mistake has been made before. More amused than spooked, she lets him look.
He pat-down searches her — which she tolerates, still aware it’s the usual — but then he moves to strip-searching her and then she starts to resist. He tells her she’s in contempt of the law. He tells her she’s under arrest. He tells her exactly how much time she’d get for streetwalking, and then increases his estimate. Trick-turning is a felony in Piltover and Stillwater does not in any meaningful way offer parole.
She spits in his face. This isn’t received well.
She fights him, and, caught off guard and off her game, for the first time, she loses.
Jinx is old enough that she’s starting to be catcalled regularly, but Silco hasn’t really talked to her about sex yet. Not that he really needs to — she’s a Lanes kid, a sumprat, a fissuefucker through and through; she knows, she’s known since, like, forever — but it will occur to her later that he hadn’t thought she was old enough for that talk yet.
But it didn’t matter.
The enforcer offers her a way out. She says no. It doesn’t matter. He shoves her belly-first against the wall. She was supposed to agree, so he proceeds anyway.
It’s more public than she would like.
When it becomes clear that she really won’t be getting out of this she sort of goes out of her body. It’s the sort of trick that always worked before — when she was really really scared, or when Vi had pushed her too much, or when the nightmares chased her straight out of her head — she could just stop being there. Her body would freeze, go limp, go pliant for her. She could step outside it and shut the door and walk away.
So it’s from far away above that Jinx experiences most of it. Her face sets in stone. There are fingers, comments. His hands rub up and down her body, touch her neck, grope her chest, stroke her stomach. He says things she’d normally make him regret. Her head is full of cotton. Her ears ring. There is surprisingly little penetration. She’s seen worse. He finishes in a way that means she doesn’t have to worry about a pregnancy. She collects her clothes and disappears as fast as possible and — and — just — fuck the enforcers, really.
She doesn’t tell Silco. Thinking about that makes her head fuzzy and something in her tilt sick and strange and wrong, and anyways he’d pitch a fit about it — she can’t imagine what he’d do to Piltover over this. If Silco hears, he’ll talk to her about it, and she doesn’t want to talk about it. An onlooker potentially seeing and telling Silco about it was one of the worst parts of it happening in public . She needs it to be over and to lock the experience up somewhere and throw away the key.
Days later, his hand running soothingly up and down her back — and he almost never touches her first anymore, not since she started got bigger, she’s usually the one touching him, she must look really bad — everything pitches sideways and she’s suddenly a little nauseated at his touch. Seasick. She doesn’t understand why it’s happening. She shouldn’t feel that way with him.
He notices something is wrong, but Sevika hasn’t reported any trouble recently and Silco doesn’t push Jinx to explain anything she doesn’t want to explain. She gets better. She doesn’t talk about it. Jinx tells Silco almost everything, but part of her almost wishes — well — part of her almost wishes she could talk about it with Vi.
iii.
Jinx can’t breathe.
Silco'd told her about the way it was before. Gas in the streets, air unbreathable. The Grey. Chemtechnology. Vesicants and urticants and mustards. Fissurefolk thrashing and rasping and seizing and ceasing. Folk down to the ground, ripe for the picking for whatever enforcers chose to do to them, even if what the enforcers chose was leaving them to die. Jinx has heard, in fact, the raspy, hacking cough, the thing it did to Silco forever, things even Shimmer couldn’t repair and that would have eventually killed him if someone hadn’t beaten it to the punch. Silco trained her in surviving all sorts of things, but he never trained her in this. Preventing her from ever going through this like he had to was probably the great structural achievement of his life.
Someone is doing it to her on purpose.
There being nothing else she can do, she runs.
And—
Creak of footsteps and too-loud breathing through a mask and Jinx would see the face behind it gone all up in neon even if she were blindfolded. Jinx would know her in a crowd — in a housefire — in an ocean. She knows the hair and the hands and the slow heavy steps and the unsure way the head turns around, and even with all the training they did together as kids hiding in that cellar, her Enforcer doesn’t think to look up .
( “Are we still sisters?“
“Nothing is ever going to change that.” )
It’s the crying that gives her position away, and then Vi tries to kill her.