Chapter Text
Loop 847. Four minutes until Silco falls. Three seconds after, Jinx breaks. Not this time.
The Z-Drive whirred against Ekko's chest, its mechanical heartbeat syncing with his own ragged pulse. Amber hextech light painted the office walls in sickly gold, casting shadows that writhed like smoke made solid. The air tasted of ozone and iron, temporal energy thick enough to choke on, heavy with the weight of inevitability.
Ekko's fingers brushed the device. Four minutes. Two hundred and forty seconds. He'd counted every one, eight hundred and forty-six times over.
"Move left. Duck. Count two, one, two."
His whispered commands cut through the oppressive silence. Papers scattered across Silco's desk caught the amber glow, decanters of shimmer casting prismatic refractions that hurt to look at. The cigar smoke hung motionless, as if time itself held its breath.
Ekko's movements were robotic, precise. Muscle memory carved from repetition. Forty-two seconds until the guards shift. Seventeen steps to the blind spot. Two bullets, trajectory calculated, deflection angles memorized.
The Z-Drive sparked.
Light flared unnaturally blue-white, crackling against the amber. Ekko's breath caught. Never happened before. Not once in eight hundred attempts. The temporal energy felt different, thicker, pressing against his skin like water at depth.
"Thirty-eight seconds. Thirty-seven."
Footsteps echoed from the hallway. Right on schedule. Ekko positioned himself behind the heavy curtain, phantom pain already blooming in his shoulder where the first guard's bullet would graze. Except this time, he'd duck low, roll right, use the desk as cover.
The door burst open.
", every corner of the Undercity will celebrate your death!" Jinx's voice rang out, shrill with manufactured madness.
Ekko mouthed the words along with her, his lips moving in perfect synchronization. He'd heard this speech so many times it felt like scripture, sacred and damning.
Silco's response came measured, paternal. "I know you'll be the one to, "
", light the spark, " Ekko finished silently, already moving.
The Z-Drive hummed deeper now, vibrations rattling his ribs. Something was wrong. The temporal field felt unstable, reality bending at the edges of his vision. But he couldn't stop. Not when he was this close.
Twenty-two seconds.
First guard rounded the corner. Ekko rolled, came up behind the mahogany desk as planned. The bullet sparked off brass fixtures exactly where his head had been moments before. Perfect execution.
Seventeen seconds.
Jinx raised the shark launcher, tears streaming down her paint-stained cheeks. "You were the only one, "
Ekko was already moving, launching himself from behind cover. The second guard spun, rifle tracking, but Ekko had calculated this angle eight hundred times. Shoulder check, weapon redirected high. Plaster rained from the ceiling.
Twelve seconds.
"Powder, " Silco said, voice breaking with paternal love. "I never would have given you to them. Not for anything."
The words hit Ekko like physical blows. He'd memorized every inflection, every pause. Silco meant it. Every single time, the bastard meant it.
Eight seconds.
Jinx's finger found the trigger. Ekko dove, arms outstretched, trajectory perfect. He could see it all unfolding, the shark's arc, Silco's final moment of realization, the explosion that would tear through father and daughter both.
Not this time.
His body collided with Jinx just as the shark launcher fired. They tumbled together, the projectile sailing wide, embedding itself in the far wall with a dull thud. No explosion. No fire. No death.
Silence.
Ekko rolled, gasping, expecting to see Silco collapsed, expecting blood. Instead, the Eye of Zaun stood frozen, amber eyes wide with shock. Alive. Breathing. Staring at the unexploded ordnance jutting from his office wall.
"I, " Silco started.
A different sound cut through the air. Not an explosion. Not gunfire. A soft, broken exhale that made Ekko's blood freeze.
He looked down.
Jinx lay in his arms, blue hair spilling across his chest. But her eyes, God, her eyes. They weren't filled with rage or grief or madness. They were empty. Vacant. Staring through him like he was made of glass.
"Jinx?" Ekko's voice cracked. "Jinx, look at me."
She blinked once, slow and mechanical. When she spoke, her voice was flat, emotionless. "Who's Jinx?"
The Z-Drive screamed against his chest, temporal energy cascading in blue-white arcs. Reality shimmered, then snapped back into focus. But something fundamental had shifted. Broken.
Ekko had saved Silco's life. Prevented the explosion. Stopped the cycle of violence that had consumed them all.
And somehow, he'd lost her completely.
"No, " he whispered, cradling her limp form. "No, this isn't it. This isn't…"
Jinx's empty gaze drifted past him, unseeing. Whatever spark had made her Powder, whatever fire had forged her into Jinx, it was gone. Extinguished. As if saving her body had somehow cost him her soul.
The Z-Drive's whirring grew erratic, unstable. Loop 847 was supposed to be different. It was different.
It was worse.
Ekko's hands trembled against Jinx's shoulders. Her weight felt wrong, not injured wrong, but absent wrong. Like holding a marionette with severed strings.
"Jinx? Hey, look at me. You're safe now."
The Z-Drive sputtered against his chest, temporal energy bleeding blue sparks that left afterimages in his vision. Reality hiccupped. For a split second, he saw double, Jinx lying dead in the explosion, Jinx breathing in his arms. Both equally real.
Her head lolled back, blue hair spilling between his fingers. When she spoke, her voice came out small and broken, nothing like the manic energy that usually crackled around her.
"Vi? Where's Vi? I want to go home..."
The words hit Ekko like ice water. That wasn't Jinx. That was,
"Powder?"
She blinked slowly, confusion clouding her features. Her posture shifted, shoulders hunching inward like a child seeking shelter. When she looked at him, her eyes held none of Jinx's sharp intelligence or wild unpredictability. Just fear.
"I can't find her. She said she'd come back, but I can't find her anywhere."
Ekko's breath caught. This wasn't shock. Wasn't trauma. People didn't regress this completely, this instantly. He'd seen Jinx broken before, after Silco's death, during her worst episodes. But this felt like watching someone dissolve from the inside out.
"This is just shock, " he said, more to himself than to her. "You've been through trauma before. This will pass."
A laugh bubbled up from her throat, bitter and sharp. Her entire demeanor changed, spine straightening, eyes hardening. When she spoke again, her voice carried a weight that made Ekko's skin crawl.
"Nothing stays saved, does it? Nothing ever fucking stays saved."
Her hands clenched into fists against his jacket. The movement was violent, controlled, nothing like Powder's desperate reaching. This was someone else entirely.
"You think you're so clever with your little time toy. Rewind, restart, replay. But you can't rewrite the fundamental truth: everything burns. Everyone leaves. Everyone dies."
"Jinx…"
"I watched you try, you know. Over and over and over. Eight hundred and forty-seven times, wasn't it? Such dedication. Such beautiful, pointless dedication."
Ekko's blood turned to ice. "What did you say?"
The temperature in the room seemed to drop. Shadows deepened in corners that shouldn't have cast shadows. When Jinx spoke again, her voice came from somewhere vast and distant, like sound traveling across space.
"I can see them all, Ekko. Every loop. Every time you tried to save Powder, she burned away. Every time you tried to stop Jinx, she burned out. What's left is the ash. I like that name, Ash."
Her body went perfectly still. Not relaxed, still. Like a held breath, like the moment between lightning and thunder. Her eyes focused on something beyond the room, beyond the walls, beyond anything Ekko could comprehend.
"Eight hundred and forty-seven different ways to watch Silco die. Eight hundred and forty-seven different ways to fail. You catalogued them all, didn't you? Filed them away in that methodical little mind."
The Z-Drive sparked violently. Reality glitched, for a heartbeat, Ekko saw the office overlaid with dozens of other versions. Silco dead, Silco alive, walls blown out, furniture rearranged. All possible timelines bleeding through simultaneously.
"Which... which one of you am I talking to?"
Light seemed to soften around them, dust motes drifting like snow. When Powder's voice returned, it carried the warmth of a dying fire.
"Don't be scared. I know it's confusing. Vi used to get confused too, when I'd talk to the voices in the walls."
"There are no voices in the walls, Powder."
Her expression cycled rapidly, child to adult to something else entirely. Three different people wearing the same face.
Jinx laughed. "Oh, but there are. There always have been. Milo. Claggor. Vander. They never really left, did they? They just got... louder."
Ash spoke without moving her lips, the words seeming to come from the air itself. "Time isn't linear when you break it enough. Past and future bleed together. We're all here now, Ekko. All of us. Every version she's ever been."
Ekko scrambled backward, but Jinx, all of her, followed. Her movements were wrong, like three different people trying to control the same body. One hand reached for him tenderly while the other clenched in fury while her legs remained perfectly motionless.
"What have I done?"
The question escaped him as a whisper, but it echoed strangely in the office. Too many echoes. Voices from other loops, other attempts, other failures layering over each other.
"You saved me, " Powder said, tears streaming down her cheeks.
"You broke me, " Jinx snarled through the same tears.
"You completed me, " Ash observed with clinical detachment.
All three voices began speaking at once, words weaving together in an impossible harmony. Powder's desperate pleas for home, Jinx's bitter cataloguing of betrayals, Ash's cosmic observations about time and consequence. The sound filled the office, seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.
The Z-Drive screamed against Ekko's chest, temporal energy cascading in wild arcs. Where the energy touched the walls, reality cracked. He caught glimpses of other times, other places, the tree, the Firelights' hideout, Vi's fists, Silco's eyes, explosions that had happened and hadn't happened and would happen.
"Stop, " he gasped. "Please, just stop."
But they couldn't stop. Wouldn't stop. Eight hundred and forty-seven loops had shattered something fundamental, and his perfect rescue had collected all the pieces in one impossible place.
Jinx smiled at him with three different expressions, love and hate and emptiness, all wearing the same face.
"You wanted to save Powder, " she said in perfect unison. "You wanted to stop Jinx. You wanted to prevent the silence that comes after."
The Z-Drive gave one final, agonized whine before going dark.
"Congratulations, Ekko. You got them all."
The Z-Drive's weight felt wrong against Ekko's chest, too light, as if pieces were missing. He cradled Jinx against him, her body unnaturally pliant, and pushed through the office door into corridors that shouldn't exist.
The Last Drop's lower level stretched before him, but the geometry was all wrong. Walls bent at impossible angles, disappearing into shadow that seemed to swallow light. The ceiling pressed down, then soared impossibly high, then snapped back to crush the air from his lungs.
His footsteps echoed, not just once, but in layers. The sharp crack of his boots on wooden planks mixed with the softer pad of worn sneakers, the hesitant shuffle of someone lost. Eight hundred different versions of himself walking these same halls, temporal ghosts bleeding through fractured reality.
"Where's Vi?" Powder whispered against his shoulder, her voice small and broken. "I drew her a picture. She'll like it, won't she?"
Her finger traced shapes in the air, stars, maybe, or bombs. The movement left glowing trails that hung in space for heartbeats too long before fading.
The air tasted of copper and ozone, thick enough to choke on. Each breath felt like drowning in reverse, too much pressure, reality itself pressing against his lungs. The temperature swung wildly. Arctic cold bit at his face while summer heat radiated from the walls, seasons colliding in impossible layers.
"Look how the walls bend, Boy Savior." Jinx's voice cut through Powder's murmuring, sharp with bitter amusement. "That's your handiwork. Beautiful destruction, isn't it? Time doesn't like to be unwound."
Ekko gritted his teeth, adjusting his grip. The corridor ahead flickered, sometimes narrow and cramped, sometimes wide enough for vehicles. Light bulbs stuttered between states. Some hung dark and cracked, frozen in moments of past failure. Others burned nuclear-bright, casting shadows that moved independent of their sources.
A chair materialized in his path, whole for a heartbeat, then splintered and broken, then solid again. He sidestepped carefully, reality grinding against itself like broken gears.
"The little light-boy is breaking too." The third voice, Ash, empty and observational, spoke without moving Jinx's lips. "Time doesn't like to be unwound. It fights back. It spreads."
"Shut up, " Ekko muttered, more to himself than to her. "Just... one problem at a time."
A figure flickered into existence ahead of him. Dust, one of his younger Firelights, barely sixteen, known for her ability to slip through Piltover patrols like smoke. Except she wasn't solid. Her edges wavered, translucent one moment, gone the next, snapping back into focus like a broken hologram.
She moved in jerky, repetitive motions, checking her watch, looking over her shoulder, raising her hand to her ear. A looped action from another timeline, playing on endless repeat.
"Boss?" Her voice came from everywhere and nowhere, distorted like sound traveling through water. "Boss, the raid on... wait, when are we? What day is this?"
Ekko's blood turned to ice. The loops weren't just rewinding him anymore. They were bleeding into everything, everyone. How many Firelights had he,
"Focus on me." His voice cracked, but he forced authority into it. Leadership instincts fighting against the growing panic that clawed at his chest. "Dust, what's your name? Just tell me your name."
Her image stuttered, phases overlapping. Three different ages at once, child, teenager, adult she'd never become. "I... Dust? Emma? I can't... the shadows are wrong, Boss. The shadows don't match the light."
She was right. The shadows fell upward in some places, stretched impossibly long in others. Graffiti on the walls shifted when he wasn't looking directly at it, revolutionary slogans becoming children's drawings becoming warnings in languages he didn't recognize.
"I need to talk to Jinx, " Ekko said desperately, speaking to the weight in his arms. "Just Jinx. Can you do that for me?"
Powder's voice, tiny and lost: "She's sleeping. She sleeps when things get too loud."
"She's not sleeping, she's hiding. Like always. Can't face what she's done." Ash observed clinically. "We're all done, all doing, all will do. Tense becomes meaningless when time breaks apart."
The corridor stretched, impossibly long now. Each step should have brought him closer to the main level, but the distance doubled, tripled. Dust continued her broken loop beside him, occasionally reaching out with translucent fingers that passed through his shoulder.
Ekko fumbled for his radio with his free hand, nearly dropping Jinx in the process. Static filled the air, sharp and painful. He adjusted the frequency, desperation mounting.
"Anyone... anyone out there? Scar? Phoenix?"
More static. Then a voice, familiar but wrong, his own voice from another loop, younger and more confident: "The plan is simple. Vi goes in first, I provide cover from, "
He twisted the dial violently. Different static. Then another voice, older this time: ", can't hold the bridge much longer! They're overwhelming our, "
Again. More static. The sound layered with Dust's confused questions, with Jinx's three voices murmuring in harmony, with his own echoing footsteps. The cacophony built until his skull felt ready to split.
"Please, " he whispered. "Somebody answer. Somebody help me."
Static. Static. Then,
A voice cut through the chaos, calm and clinical. Viktor's voice, steady as mathematics.
"Temporal resonance at 23.7%. Critical threshold: 67%."
Ekko froze. The words hung in the air like pronouncement, measured and precise. Not a warning. Not an alarm. Data. Cold, calculated observation.
"Viktor?" His voice cracked. "Viktor, is that you? How are you, "
The transmission cut to static, then silence. But the implications crashed over him like ice water. Viktor had been tracking the loops. All along, someone had been watching, measuring, recording every failure.
His burden wasn't his alone.
He'd been observed, studied, catalogued like a lab rat in a temporal maze.
Dust flickered one final time, her confused voice fading to nothing. The corridor snapped back to normal dimensions. The temperature stabilized. Even Jinx's three voices fell quiet.
In the sudden stillness, Ekko stood paralyzed between relief and betrayal, carrying the weight of broken time and wondering who else knew the true cost of his eight hundred and forty-seven attempts to save what couldn't be saved.
The storage room beneath The Last Drop had always been Ekko's sanctuary. Crates of supplies, spare hoverboard parts, maps of Zaun's underground tunnels, familiar chaos that meant safety. Now the walls bent like melted wax, stretching and contracting with each pulse of the Z-Drive's failing light.
He set Jinx down carefully against a stack of medical supplies, her body unnaturally pliant. The crates flickered between solid and translucent, showing glimpses of other timelines, sometimes empty, sometimes overflowing with different cargo, sometimes not there at all.
"Stay here, " he whispered, though he wasn't sure which version of her was listening. "I'm going to fix this."
His radio crackled to life before he could even adjust the frequency. Viktor's voice cut through the static, clinical and measured.
"Ekko? Your temporal signature is... concerning."
Relief flooded through him so suddenly his knees nearly buckled. "Viktor! Thank god. I need help. The Z-Drive, it's, something's wrong. Reality is breaking apart."
"We've been tracking temporal anomalies since loop 200."
The words hit like a physical blow. Ekko's hands tightened around the radio, knuckles white. "We? You've been watching me this whole time?"
"Each iteration creates cascade potential. Your current resonance suggests reality structural damage approaching critical thresholds."
Behind him, Jinx's three voices began their unsettling harmony. Powder hummed a lullaby, off-key and broken. Jinx muttered profanities in languages that shouldn't exist. Ash made no sound but somehow added to the cacophony.
"The science man sounds scared, " Powder observed, her voice cutting through Viktor's transmission. "Why is everyone always scared?"
Ekko twisted the radio volume higher, trying to drown her out. "Viktor, ignore that. I saved her. I finally saved her, but she's... she's broken into pieces."
Static burst from the speaker, then Viktor's voice returned, tinged with something that might have been sympathy. "Ekko, you must understand, every loop creates what we call 'temporal echoes.' They accumulate like scar tissue."
The walls around them shimmered, becoming transparent for a heartbeat. Through them, Ekko glimpsed other versions of this room, burned out, flooded, filled with Enforcers, completely empty. All equally real, all impossibly occupying the same space.
"The readings are wrong, " Ekko said, desperation creeping into his voice. "I can control this. I've been doing it for, "
"Eight hundred and forty-seven iterations." Viktor's tone remained steady, implacable. "We have precise measurements, Ekko. Current resonance suggests we're at 23.7% structural degradation. Critical threshold is 67%, beyond that, total temporal collapse."
"Because they should be scared, " rage snarled through Jinx's lips, her voice layering over Viktor's words. "Because he's been playing god with broken toys."
Ekko's hand found the Z-Drive, its surface burning hot against his palm. Thin wisps of smoke curled from the device's edges, and its usual steady pulse had become erratic, skipping beats like a dying heart.
"How do I fix her without making it worse?"
"Imagine rewinding a spring 847 times, " Viktor said, his voice cutting through growing static. "The metal becomes brittle, prone to snap. Time has rules. Break them enough, and they break back."
The radio flickered between frequencies on its own, Viktor's voice mixing with older transmissions, conversations from loops past, future warnings that hadn't happened yet, distress calls from Firelights who might not even exist anymore.
", can't hold the bridge, "
", Vi's not coming back, "
", timeline collapse imminent, "
Ekko fumbled with the controls, sweat dripping onto the device. Each adjustment brought a different voice, a different warning, until the overlapping transmissions became a wall of sound that made his skull ache.
"Why won't things just work out for once?" Ekko muttered, sadness heavy in his voice. "For the first time ever, I had it all planned out. The math added up. So why, of all times, when I actually save the one I, why does everything go wrong?"
"Because mathematics doesn't care about love, Ekko, " Ash said, "and love doesn't care about mathematics."
The words landed like ice in Ekko's chest. He stared at the radio, Viktor's clinical measurements echoing in his mind. Twenty-three point seven percent. How much damage had one person absorbed? How much more could reality take?
"I've been damaging reality for 847 loops, " he whispered into the radio.
Viktor's response came without hesitation. "Yes."
The simple confirmation shattered something inside Ekko's chest. Not denial, not false hope, just the brutal weight of truth. He sank to his knees, the radio clutched against his chest like a lifeline.
"How many people have I erased by accident?"
Static filled the air for long moments. When Viktor spoke again, his voice carried a weight that made Ekko's blood freeze.
"We don't know. Temporal echoes make it impossible to calculate precise causalities. But... substantial."
Around them, the walls continued their liquid dance. Graffiti shifted and changed, revolutionary slogans becoming children's drawings becoming epitaphs for people who might never have existed. The floor beneath his knees felt unstable, as if he might fall through into some other version of this moment.
Jinx sat in the corner, her three voices weaving together in patterns that hurt to follow. Sometimes she looked directly at him with Powder's wide, confused eyes. Sometimes she glared with her normal bitter fury. Sometimes she stared through him with Ash's empty gaze, seeing things that weren't there or weren't there yet.
"The little light-boy is breaking too, " Ash observed, though her lips didn't move. "Time doesn't like to be unwound. It fights back. It spreads."
Ekko's hands shook as he raised the radio again. His voice came out steady despite the tremor in his chest. "Viktor, can you help me stabilize her? Just tell me what to do."
"Ekko." Viktor's voice carried something like sadness. "I'm not certain stabilization is possible at this stage. The temporal fractures run too deep. We're dealing with fundamental structural damage to the local spacetime matrix."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only answer I have."
The Z-Drive sparked against Ekko's chest, blue-white energy cascading in wild arcs. Where the energy touched the walls, reality cracked further. He caught glimpses of other times, other places, the tree burning, the bridge collapsing, Vi's fists bloody, Silco's eyes closing for the final time in eight hundred different ways.
Every failure. Every death. Every moment he'd tried to rewrite, only to create new catastrophes in the spaces between seconds.
"I have to find a way to undo this, " he said, steel creeping into his voice.
Viktor's transmission crackled with interference. "Ekko, listen carefully. Any further temporal manipulation risks pushing us beyond the critical threshold. If you reach 67%, "
"Then what?" Ekko demanded. "Reality ends? Time stops? Tell me what happens."
The radio went silent except for static. When Viktor's voice returned, it was barely above a whisper.
"Then everything we've ever known ceases to have happened. Past, present, future, all of it unravels into quantum foam. Not just Zaun, not just Piltover. Everything. All of it, gone."
Ekko stared at Jinx, who smiled at him with three different kinds of sadness. Her eyes flickered between states, lost child, broken weapon, empty void. She was beautiful and terrible and impossible, a living monument to his failures and his undying love.
The walls bled temporal energy, showing glimpses of what had been and what might be. The air tasted of copper and endings. And somewhere in Viktor's clinical measurements lay a countdown to the end of everything.
Sixty-seven percent felt like a promise and a threat, a line drawn in sand that kept shifting with each beat of his breaking heart.