#the daughter vi dad silco dysfunction just hits different

[revelisms]

Excerpt: Six Years

Vi wrestles with the realization of how much her sister has changed—and how many unwanted parallels she sees between Silco and their father. From a work-in-progress set after heron blue.

In some ways, she was still so familiar. Her perpetual nest of a living condition and geriatric sense of humor; her inability (refusal) to tend to her hair, herself. Yet, in so many ways, she's nothing like the girl Vi remembers. 

A shell. A stranger.

Jinx—a name that doesn't belong to her sister, that christens a girl who spits at the name Powder; whose body bares sinew and steel, wears yellowed stains at her chipped fingernails and speaks a drawl decades beyond her years—isn't a child, anymore. 

Eleven years, enmeshed in each others' days and nights; eleven, that Vi had always been with her. 

Powder's rock and shield. Powder's everything.  

Then the cannery had happened. Stillwater had happened. That monster had happened—

A monster whose gait she could pick out from a crowd: hears prowling over the floors now, above the jukebox and the metal tickings and her sister's self-directed rambling—a heavy-heeled th-thumping up the varnished steps, his coat a devil's whisper against the walls.

Vi steels herself. Beside her, Jinx prattles on. 

"Y'ever thought of fighting in a ring, sis?"

Th-thump, th-thumping over the dark floors.  

"You'd be the scrappiest scrapper in the Underground. Bet they'd call ya the Red Devil—or Lead Lettie—or Sourmouth Suckerpunch—"

She stares, unblinking, plastic squeezed beneath her thumb. Through the sliver of her sister's cracked door, a polish-slick boot wades through the shadows. Stills.  

"What you really need," Jinx says, with a lax crook of her screwdriver, "is a pair of Vandie's old gauntlets—that'll set'em right."

Vi swallows. The hall's dark devours the wraith on the other side of the door: shrouds all but the unearthly cat's-eye that tips over the leather at his shoulder, burning like a funeral pyre over a rotting corpse. 

"Yeah," she says, stiffly. Comb-teeth bite into her palm. "That's all I need."

His stare lingers—three-four-five beats—before it flits to the floor, trails over the blue tangled within her fingers, traces its mess back to the girl lounged beside her. Jinx stays worlds away in her tinkering, head lolled against the floor. She wrenches another screw into place.

"It's late," Jinx huffs, without needing a glance. "I know."

Silence, for a moment. Then Silco agrees, "It's late, indeed."

Jinx scowls. "One'ta talk."

If the shadows weren't playing a trick on her, Vi might have thought he'd smirked. But that bastard never smiled—never did anything but glare over his paperwork, around the vile plumes of his cigars: eyeing her hyena of a sister like a stray in need of a meal, and Vi like a bull ready to charge. 

Signing a blood-pact to his enterprise (their city's scheme for fiscal independence; her sister's unfathomable choice for a homestead) had done nothing in the way of trust. He'd taken an overseer's scrutiny to her, from the day she'd put her name in ink: a dead-eyed panopticon hounding her every waking hour, as though she'd never left that molding cell.

On one hand, a part of her reasoned, he had a right—sizing up her methods, as he would any new recruit; strategizing where best to slot her in the arteries of a drug-machine already years on the march. A more cynical thread knew he was laying his cards flat and playing the long game. Slouching back, idly, with eyes unblinking, to find any reason to put her under his heel.

She stares at the unmarred side of his face: a dim halo in a coal-blackened sea.

Eleven years that she'd been with Powder.

Six—nearly seven, now—that Jinx has had this snake at her side.

From the doorway, his shadow gravels, "I take it you'll be off soon." 

"Soon as the bell chimes." Jinx flits her wrist, pinkie-promise. "Not a rhyme later—cross my hearts and hope to snore."

Silco makes a low chuff at that: strange, quiet, bemused. A not-quite laugh, like Dad used to do. 

For a moment, a breath tangled in her throat, Vi sees him. 

He was tower of a man, thin as a string. His voice itched with smoke-pocked lungs and dreams that glittered like the stars. He kept chewing tobacco sweetened with cinnamon under his tongue, and he wore the mines on his clothes; gave hugs that made one's soul feel like it'd been wrapped in down-feathers; made the moonlight seem like nothing more than hand-sculpted glass: some beautiful thing he'd spooled on a thread and hung up there for all to see.

He'd been everything to her—her image of whistle-toothed optimism, her laughter, her guiding light—until he wasn't.

Freckles smattering her cheeks, her unruly hair the color of redmilk tea, a younger version of herself had shrieked over the idea of having to share her plates, pillows, toys with some snot-nosed little girl—a blue-haired, rambunctious, wailing thing—a sister. She'd stomped her feet and thrown fits over it. Told Dad, flat out: I don't wanna have her!

He'd stood slouched over her, hands bracketed at his thin waist, a glitter in his pale eyes, and chuffed. You'll do great, Lettie. His smile always pulled a touch crooked at one corner: a sincerity that, without fail, made her believe him. 

She'd always believed him, then. 

She was too young, too naïve not to.

Staring into an empty threshold, into a shadowed hall, a ghost of footsteps thudding down the dark floors, Vi fights to forget their father's voice. To block out the echo of a rasp no part of her wants to compare to it. To ignore the remnants of smoke on the air—tower of a man, thin as a string, heels heavy-footed from those damn mines—that belonged to a man she'd sooner wring the neck of. Wouldn't dare put in the same vein of everything their father was.

(Complicated. Self-loathing. Hellishly tempered. Kind.)

#first arcane wip post in...how many months?? #truly cannot remember #work has been an absolute hellhole but I am. slowly. catching a break #i have so many fics i need to catch up on reading ghh #arcane #arcane fanfic #fic excerpt #writing #jinx arcane #vi arcane #silco arcane #this wip has been burning a hole in my files and augh i want to finish it at some point #the daughter vi dad silco dysfunction just hits different