Luxurious Anarchy (Lux/Jinx)

Chapter 30: Keep You

Pain.

"Aaaggghhh!"

Her existence was pain.

"No, please, NO!"

Jinx howled and shook, tried to arch her body away from the searing agony she knew was coming.

Of course she knew, she'd lived through it once before.

The needle, the syringe of Shimmer found her veins from half a city away, making her heart stutter and skip, making her vision swim and boil.

Manacles, Shimmer grade restraints, held her arms and legs fast, and chains of petricite threaded stone weighed down on her, keeping her fastened to a chair. The mancatcher collar, hardened Piltover steel lined with barbs of Demacian petricite, still hung around her neck, gently digging into her flesh with its dull teeth. A leather harness was fitted around her chest, the line that had hoisted her into the sky unceremoniously hacked off, dangling just past her waist like a bobbed tail.

She blinked, and tried to take note of her surroundings before the next needle sank into her body again. All around her, people bickered and argued, words words words, almost impossible to keep track of through the pain.

Almost.

"You should have killed her!" snarled a man in fancy brass-looking scale mail, a crown-thingie set in his helmet.

"But my prince, your most recent orders were to capture her and-"

The crowned man's hand shot out, a slap echoing in the room. The spindly man went down on one knee, blood dripping from where the prince's armor cut him.

The phantom needle slid home again, piercing her organs, poisoning her from the inside out, and Jinx screamed once more, losing herself in the ocean of pain.

She wanted to drown in that ocean, wanted to sink beneath the waves of agony forever, sink to where the pain consumed her and the hurt was no more.

Perhaps she would have, except for the promise, the hope of sunshine.

Her Sunshine.

"Lux" she murmured, drooling on herself as the world slowly came back into focus.

Her head jerked to the side, propelled by a fist encased in rigid scales and hardened by hatred, and Jinx spat out a thick mouthful of blood on instinct. The mauve ichor spattered on the pale marble floor, and the boots of someone almost comically broad at the shoulder.

"Keep her name out of your filthy mouth, you monster ," snarled the prince.

Jinx felt her skin crawling, felt her eyes sizzle like eggs on the skillet, felt her body coming apart at the seams. Head lolling, she looked up at the absolute wall of a man who she'd accidentally spat blood on.

"Hey big guy, we cool?" she slurred.

The living wall clad in Demacia's colors almost smiled, and Jinx had a brief moment of cognitive dissonance when that twitch of a grin brought Lux to mind.

But then the needle slid home, imaginary or real, it didn't matter, and she screamed and thrashed, drowning once more in her private ocean of suffering.

When she surfaced next, someone had thoughtfully jammed a length of knotted cord in her mouth to silence the screaming. Right in front of her, there was a shouting match going on, between some fancy-suited mechanical soul and the prince with anger issues.

"By my blood right-"

"Which holds no sway over Piltover, but go on," the living suit of clockwork sneered.