Chapter Text
Honestly, that's not honesty
And the others may not see it but girl, how I can feel it in me
(We got no resemblance)
Kneel and taste my vengeance now
This, then, is how it happened, in those days:
Piltover and Zaun had been decapitated at a stroke. It was a chaotic time, and bloody, as mobs and soldiers - such as either city had worthy of the name - clashed in the streets. Firelights against Enforcers, chem-tanks against citizen militia, union strikers against the nobility’s huscarls. Internal conflict there was aplenty too; the Firelights and the unions were no friends to the chem-barons, what was left of the Council was unable to control the noble houses, and rogue Enforcer gangs cut swathes of murder and pillage through the slums of Zaun. Above and against it all danced Jinx, the Loose Cannon, the devil with a hundred bloody hands. Piltover and Zaun both feared her, hated her: Piltover for obvious reasons, and Zaun for many of its own - for killing Silco, for her years of killing for Silco, for bringing down the wrath of Topside upon them, and on the chem-barons’ part simply because she did not answer to them.
It was against her, then, that the hurriedly-repopulated High Council of Piltover came together. Jinx, who had started the war, who had done more than anyone except poor martyred Silco to break Zaun’s chains and call Piltover’s blood-debts due, became the scapegoat upon whom all of both cities’ sins were heaped. It was a much easier narrative for everyone to swallow than acknowledging that every day Piltover couldn’t pretend to have Zaun under control was another day that Noxus, sharklike, sensing weakness, might follow the scent of blood to their door.
In the end, nothing changed. The blood of Zaun’s people still seeped up to fill Piltover’s coffers, and in return the Undercity was blessed with renewed rains of effluvium and industrial runoff. The chem-barons still took their cut, and purchased with it umbrellas to shield themselves from the return flow of Piltover’s shit. Whatever lip service they paid to the idea of the Nation of Zaun was nothing but a tool to secure the obedience of the gullible, and perhaps to help themselves sleep at night.
And what of Jinx? They said she was no longer human, if indeed she ever had been. No one could have survived a shot to the head from newly-promoted Warden-Captain Kirraman’s hextech rifle during their duel across the rooftops of the Medarda warehouses, nor the subsequent fall into the river. No one could have left two dozen of Baron Gleight’s finest cutters as meat for the Kindred in a single night. No one could have danced with the Wolf of the Undercity and lived. No one, no one, no one - and yet, Jinx. For her, the most hated woman in two cities, the war had never ended.
For her, the war would never end.
Seraphine wanted to cry. She was shaking from humiliation and exhaustion, and shaken by what had probably been one of the least pleasant social experiences of her entire seventeen years of life - could barely remember what had happened, the stress fragmenting the memories before they’d had a chance to fully form.
“Sera, baby! You did great in there, good show!” A figure approached her as she hurried down the hallway, her vision gray and blurry through choked-back rage and unshed tears. At the press of his emotions against hers - smug, self-congratulatory satisfaction, and nothing at all resembling concern for her - she instinctively flinched away from her manager, a man named by his excessively-scholastic parents Hypothesis Kent (he insisted that she refer to him as “Hype”).
“You said this was just going to be an interview,” she said. She’d wanted to snap angrily, but it came out instead shrill and plaintive. “You didn’t tell me I was going to have to- to-”
“The Council has poured millions of taels into food aid, free schools, workhouses, and yet year after year the Undercity’s crime drops not at all, their literacy rates stagnate - what do we have to show for it? How do you account for that? Ultimately, we have to face facts that more charity might not be the answer.”
“Well, I don’t- I mean, I’m not an economist, I couldn’t tell you about any of that, but I think we only need to look out our windows to see that people are suffering, and-”
“People are suffering, sure, no one’s questioning that. And my heart bleeds for the people from the Undercity who are fighting against the odds to better their own lot in life, but at a certain point they have to take responsibility for their own-”
“I mean, who even was that?” Seraphine said with a stomp of her pastel pink wedge heel.
“Jowan Rack, he’s famous. He writes politics for the Piltover Post and has his own morning radio show. Do you not listen to the radio?” Hype asked her, incredulous and chiding. “Sure, the guy’s kind of an asshole, but everyone’s talking about him. And now, everyone will be talking about you.” He poked her in the chest for emphasis.
“They’ll be talking about how I sounded like an idiot and threw a tantrum!” Seraphine said. “Mr. Kent, that was embarrassing! He was laughing at me, I could tell! I don’t want people to listen to that, and I never would have agreed to this if I’d known I was going to get picked apart for an hour for- for wanting to help people!”
With a plume of condescending red-black smugness billowing from him like ink in water, her manager put a ringed hand on her shoulder and began steering her out of the studio. “It doesn’t matter if you sounded like an idiot. In fact, it’s better if you sounded like an idiot. There’s no such thing as negative exposure, baby girl, and it doesn’t matter what people are saying about you as long as they’re saying your name. You’re young, you don’t get it yet.”
“I don’t want to do something like that again,” Seraphine protested weakly, knowing that he didn’t care. “I just want to sing, Mr. Kent.”
“And you will sing, Sera,” he said, barbed wire wrapped around his words. “But this is the business. The label isn’t gonna give your record the pressing it deserves if you don’t fill seats at your concerts, if you don’t make headlines. They’re gonna pawn you off with some second-rate ensemble band for your studio sessions, they’re not gonna push it onto store shelves, no payola to make sure you get prime airtime on the radio, nothing. Your music isn’t the product, you are, and it’s a crowded market. So why don’t you let me do my job, and sell you.”
By this time they’d emerged into the sunlight and bustle of the Piltover lunch rush. With a firm shut up and stop whining pat of her shoulder, he bundled her into a waiting taxi. “Go home, and I’ll see you at the Tower Club tonight, okay? Rest those pipes up, we wanna give ‘em a good show.”
Seraphine slumped against the window of the cab as it drove, wearily mumbling directions to the driver. The din of the city’s souls surrounded her, as loud as crashing waves. Boredom and excitement, anger and joy, compassion and callousness; close to a million people by the latest census, living close to a million lives.
She’d spent years struggling not to drown in it. Shouted until her throat was hoarse, still only barely able to hear herself. The only time she could handle it all, when she felt like she was riding the wave instead of crushed beneath it, was on stage. When she sang, she was heard. When she sang, she could hear herself, the audience taking her song and singing it back twice, ten, a hundred times over.
It was ironic, she supposed, given her unique gifts, to only feel like she was really connected to anyone during those all-too-brief moments.
She just wanted to sing. Just wanted to bring people together, to let them hear themselves the way she heard them, let them hear the world the way she heard it.
Unfortunately, wanting didn’t put food on the table. Neither had singing, until recently. She knew that Hype Kent was as cynical and self-interested as they came, but everything he’d said he’d do for her when she’d agreed to let him manage her, he’d done. She wasn’t singing at hole-in-the-wall bars anymore, she was singing at the Tower Club, and at the Stellarium, and at Josephine’s - the most famous nightclubs and music halls in Piltover. And she was putting food on the table, now. It wasn’t about the money, it really wasn’t - but it might, a little bit, be about the sky-blue relief that had radiated from her parents, however much embarrassment was piled over top of it, when she’d told them how much she could put towards their rent that month. It might, a little bit, also be about how she wanted more out of life than to eventually inherit Zheng Instruments and Autophonics, located at 7557 Windside Lane, Eastcourt, Piltover, and sell violas to schoolchildren until she died.
She’d known that chasing a dream wouldn’t be easy, but she hadn’t expected…
Well. She hadn’t expected.
She didn’t notice at first when the car stopped, until the cabbie brusquely announced “Hey, we’re here. Windside and Fifth.”
They were two blocks from her parents’ walkup. “Um, I said Windside and Seventh,” Seraphine said hesitantly.
“No, you said Fifth,” the cabbie snapped, Zaunite gutlau accent thickening. His defensiveness and anger at her perceived condescension flooded the passenger cabin in a wave of chemlight-green, and Seraphine shrank back against her seat as though physically pressed into it. Spoiled little Piltie bitch, tell me how to do my job. His soul tapped a tight and dangerous drumbeat of too many bad days in a row.
“Um, okay, that’s fine! I’m sorry!” She fumbled in her purse, handing over a string of cash for the fare - tipped twenty-five percent, of course, even though he’d been rude, had unfairly taken whatever private troubles were weighing on him and lashed out with them - and scrambled out of the car. It peeled away from the curb almost before her feet were even on the sidewalk.
“I’m not even really from Piltover,” she mumbled to herself, defensively, as she watched it drive away.
“-condone the violence of groups like the Firelights, or terrorists like Jinx?”
“I- I think that the Firelights are doing good work, they’re a mutual aid organization, I’ve volunteered with their free breakfast program before-”
“If by mutual-aid organization you mean unaccountable group of vigilantes, who intimidate and attack their fellow undercity residents and any business they think would make a good shakedown target, sure, but you’re dodging the question. What do you have to say about the violence? Why can’t the people of the undercity protest the problems - the real problems, I’m not saying they’re not real - peacefully, without resorting to bombings, and assassinations, and vandalism, and riots?”
“Well…well, no, obviously violence is bad. I think we can all solve our problems peacefully, if we just really listen to each other,” came the tentative girl’s voice over the radio. Jinx snapped the wire-cutters shut with more force than she’d intended, sending a length of metal springing off into the dimness of her workshop.
“Stupid fucking topsider bitch,” she muttered. “Comparing me to the fucking Firelights, idiot doesn’t know his ass from a mainspring. You have to understand what it’s like for the people of Zaun,” she simpered, mockingly imitating Seraphine as the talk show played on. “Girlie, if they gave a shit, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” She wrenched a screw in tighter with savage force, only the textured grip of the screwdriver letting her sweaty palm keep a grip on it. “Really listen to each other. Have you listened to yourself lately?”
Have you listened to these nuts, Mylo suggested helpfully with a lewd gesture. Claggor high-fived him.
“Thank you,” Jinx said. “Have you listened to these nuts, Seraphine?” She addressed the radio as though it could respond. “And I’m not talking about me and Pow-Pow.” She made a circling cuckoo gesture at her temple with the screwdriver.
“-about all the time we have for today, folks. Once again, Miss Seraphine, thank you so much for joining us today to share your perspective. The issue of the undercity is so polarized these days, it’s really refreshing to find someone still capable of reasonable conversation about it. You’ve been a delight to have on the show, just say the word if you’d ever like to come back. I’m Jowan Rack and this has been the Rack Attack, coming at you live all morning every morning-”
Jinx buried the screwdriver in the radio’s face, cratering its plastic shell with the violence of it. “Note to self,” she muttered as the machine sparked and died. Grabbing a hot-pink marker, she scribbled said note across the metal backing of her workbench, directly at eye level. “Jowan Rack car bomb ASAP.” She thought for a moment, then added two bullet points under it that read shoot up radio station instead? and Kill Seraphine too. “There we go,” she said with a satisfied smile, leaning back and balancing on two chair legs as she flipped and caught the marker in midair. “Man, can’t believe they’re making artists that come sold-out right outta the box now. Used to be, you had to blow up before you could sell out. City of Progress, I guess.” A snort of laughter left her. “Well. I can help with the blowing up part.”
She dropped her chair back onto all four legs and got back to work.
We’ll show them. We’ll show them all.