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Ekko feels so tired, bone-tired, unsure if the weariness will ever seep from him or if he is fated to hold onto it forever. He could do it, he’s been housing hurt his whole life.
With a pulsing headache, an ebbing emptiness numbs his limbs as though they’re all phantom.
Jinx is before him, something apparitional; a phantom herself—ever-shifting, almost see through; water from the tap, river-current haste; always running. She’s right in front of him, close enough to reach out and touch if he wished. If he doesn’t devote the entirety of his focus toward realizing her, she could be gone entirely.
She tries to vanish. Pulling the pin again and again, tipping to plunge over the ledge. I will reverse these seconds a million times over if that is what it takes, he thinks, I will sit here and replay the way you cut your eyes over your shoulder to look at me for eternity.
He aches to tell her, to reveal everything. But he’s selfish, itches to hoard it for himself; a mirrorball in his chest reflecting her face across the whole of him.
You danced with me, he could say. You were so — light-eyed, carefree. Beautiful.
She wouldn’t care for that now, he doesn’t think. It wouldn’t be right. Instead he could try something else, something more self-serving. His last chance.
"I saw you," he says, and her eyes flicker with color, entirely too vibrant for a moment before it's smothered. "You were so,"
he reaches inside of himself for what to say — something honest, something selfless, something true —
"happy."
She blinks, all furrowed brow, slanted lips.
He closes his eyes and all he can see is her. Everywhere. Her smile, her too-big eyes, the way things should have been. Benzo in the threshold, silhouetted by yellow-white sunshine, as though he was returned to Ekko from a pocket within the ether.
How does he explain it? I woke up wrong. I woke up angry. I woke up and realized that, in any universe, I find a way to love you.
No, no. That's not right. You lost so much, the one thing that holds you together here, she was gone. And yet you were — okay.
Okay is not the right word. You were…
He thinks of her lips, the way her soft gaze had bore into him, through him. A balm to something that has been blistering since they were children. There is so much guilt inside of him, heavy in the low of his abdomen. If he could go back, he likes to think he wouldn’t.
But they had danced.
For a moment, while she is standing there, waiting curiously for his next move, he debates using the Z-Drive to sit and look at her forever, to recall the way it had felt to kiss her, to have her unwavering attention. He considers it seriously: if, in this universe, he could ever allow her so close. If she would taste as sweet, or if she has been just as embittered as him by a life where everything worth having has been ripped away. He represses the memory of waking, hurling whatever he could reach, intending to hurt her and missing by scant inches.
"You were Powder," he confesses finally. Croaks, more like, and her expression crumbles as he watches on, eyes tracking how she carefully shifts her features into neutrality. The silence between them stretches on and on, he questions if she has a Z-Drive of her own, suspending the inevitable. He resists the urge to cradle his head, to soothe the pain. There’s a bursting behind his eyes, a fissure cracking wide open and spitting him out of himself again and again.
"How sweet," she drawls at last, grasping at a bravado that dissolves within her hands.
"It was." It comes out humiliatingly honest and he huffs a laugh steeped in self-deprecation. "It was all I’d ever wanted."
Her lips part, shocked or confused, possibly enraged. This is as close to a confession as Ekko can afford. He allows himself to have it. Soon, he is sure, he will have to say his final goodbye. This time to Jinx, his mourning of Powder having long since run its course.
"You didn’t come here to beg for her back," she accuses, on the defensive now. Ekko tries not to think too hard about it, her instead of me. He longs to turn the dial, to take them back so he can try this again. But this is real, he cannot live in this moment with her endlessly.
One blink and he is sitting at the bar with Benzo, trying to make the most out of the time he has. Making sure he says everything he needs to. Seeing Silco, shoulder-to-shoulder with a brother who tried to kill him. The word echoes within the canyon she has eroded in his skull — Forgiveness.
Ekko wants her bitter kiss, her angry eyes, the whole haunt of her. He wants and wants and wants. This is no longer about him, though. There is no Powder. There aren’t any rooftops for their legs to dangle from, no dance to exhaust them, no kiss that feels like an eruption as much as it does a burial. He can put it all to rest now. He has no other choice.
He shrugs, eyes downcast. The weight of the request that’s sitting idle at the base of his throat begins unsticking as he prepares to dislodge what has been suffocating him since he arrived.
I’m sorry.
No change in her expression. A spark that crackles in her pupil, one twinkling glimmer. He could have imagined it. He savors the sight for a minute more, rewinding time just once to make sure he can conjure the lines of her face when he closes his eyes. He wants to be able to remember.
Finally: “I don’t need Powder,” he assures. The tension threaded through her shoulders does not waver. He refuses to let himself yearn for her softness, begins erasing the final vestiges of Powder from him; replacing her with this image of Jinx, coated still in his love, the fixed point of it. He has to let her go. “I need your help.”