Chapter Text
Vi dreams of blue.
“It’s fucking freezing,” Vi mutters into her gloves as she buckles her seatbelt. “You sure you don’t want to turn the heat up more?”
Jayce looks over at her from behind his muffler. Then he gestures at the temperature controls.
“Knock yourself out,” he says. “It isn’t a long drive.”
“An hour’s plenty long to be a popsicle and some of us need our hands to roll croissants.” Vi pauses, fingers twiddling the knob up. “Actually, what do you do for work?”
Warm air starts to pour out from the vents. It’s a little dry but it’s also what, three days, four into the new year? Timezones are weird. Kinda whack. Vi hasn’t really slept. She’s spent almost a whole day traveling. She’s not sure why. But it is the middle of winter, the cold air outside is dry and so it stands too that the hot air from the car would be too. Or something.
The very modest Jaguar that they are both in purrs quietly along the country roads.
“I design, make, and tune weapons,” Jayce says flatly as he makes a left. “Every gun Caitlyn’s ever fired has gone through me.”
Vi nods, looking out the window at the streetlamps that go by.
“I see,” she says, tossing the new information in her head, chewing on the name she’s just learnt.
Caitlyn.
Vi dreams of the startled, shocked surprise that had sat in that pair of eyes. That flicker of hope that has melted so quickly away, that desperate hunger that'd been instantly extinguished by dread.
Just like that?
Just like that.
The drive is exactly as Jayce describes it to be, uneventful, and just this side of not-too long. Vi’s getting stiff but maybe that’s cos she’d been stiff on the plane and now she is only starting her unstiffening on these heated leather seats. That’s probably not a word but she doesn’t really care that much as the car pulls onto well-groomed gravel. It’s too dark out to see it or any of the other ornamentation that’d usually surround hedges this neat but the car doesn’t rock at all (terrible pun—she’s definitely losing it) and that, Vi knows, is quite the feat for a gravel driveway. Path. Road. Whatever.
They park after a minute of this and when the engine quiets, when she opens the door, Vi can smell the salt in the air and hear the not-too-distant crash of the waves.
It’s still too dark for gulls but she can imagine how they’d sound in the sunrise.
The quiet crunch of gravel under Jayce’s boots shakes her from her thoughts.
“So,” says Vi. “What’s the plan?”
His tall head dips slightly as he disappears into the trunk and emerges with a pair of knuckledusters in one hand and what is either a shotgun or a medieval mace in the other.
Vi knows enough to not ask how he knows. She’s not sure she wants to find out.
Vi goes to sleep thinking about how that pistol would have felt in her hand, the weight of it extended to her handle first, wakes from the nightmare of a gunshot.
“The plan,” Jayce says a few moments later after he’d beeped the car locked, “is to not get shot. You’ll go in the back. I’ll go in the front and if you find her, yell. If you need help, yell. I’ll find my way to you.”
“Great plan,” Vi says, giving his weapon a gentle tap like a fistbump. “10/10, no notes.”
Jayce raises his eyebrows but there’s a hopeful light in his eyes that makes him look even more puppy-like than she’d thought possible.
“No,” Vi says with a groan. “I think it’s pretty goddamn clear why she’s the assassin and why you’re just J.”
“I’m not just—”
“See you later, pretty boy. Try not to die before I get there.”
Vi knows that look.
She's had it before, felt it in her bones, the deepest exhaustion of knowing it'll never be the same again, the rage that wants to come bubbling up, the feeling of blood on her skin that doesn't make anything feel better as it cools.
Left to her own devices she knows she wouldn't be here, staring out through the door of the kitchen into the unlit cafe space rolling croissants out in the semi-dark even though few people come in at New Year's.
Family put her in the darkness but family pulled her out.
I'm the only family she has left, he'd said.
Vi sighs, looks down, and realizes she'll have to toss this croissant out.
Two minutes later there’s loud barking on the other side of the building which distracts Vi for long enough for her to almost miss the press of the barrel of a gun to the side of her head. Almost, because let’s face it, it’s pretty damn hard to miss that. Can’t say it’s a familiar feeling but boy does that conjure up some nasty memories real fast.
“Well,” she says when she realizes that she’s not dead. “I think as far as the plan is concerned, this is going fairly well.”
“Fairly well for you,” comes that familiar voice, “involves a muzzle to your temple? Why, Violet, one might have to ask if you’ve truly been out for so long that your brain’s melted from between your ears.”
She’s probably supposed to be insulted but the first thing that strikes Vi is a sense of relief, the realization that this woman isn’t dead, that the bag she’d packed into the trunk won’t be needed, that they’re not too late.
They’re not too late.
“To be fair,” Vi says as she slowly raises her hands and drops the knuckledusters to the floor, “Jayce did say the plan was to not get shot. Said nothing about not getting bitten.”
“Jayce?”
There’s a note of incredulity.
“Mmhm,” says Vi. “Picked me up at the airport and drove us all the way over here while looping Go the Distance. Cute but not my first choice of soundtrack, y’know?”
“He’s always had a soft spot.”
“He’s one huge soft spot.”
A soft snort. The gun falls away.
“So,” says the woman they’d scrambled here to… save? Or something. “Why are you here?”
“Uh,” says Vi most eloquently. “Should we go save Jayce first?”
“He’ll survive,” the woman says with a wave of the hand not holding the assault rifle that Vi can now see in the early blue of dawn. “Sandy’s all bark and no bite, just like him.”
A tilt of her head.
“Jayce’ll figure out how to get out of the trap just fine. He designed it, after all.”
A pause.
“Can I offer you a drink?”
A smile.
“The sunrise is rather lovely from the balcony.”
“It’s cold,” Vi mutters into her mug of hot cocoa, wrapped up in an electric blanket, seated very comfortably in a plush chair.
“The ocean breeze can be a little chilly around these parts,” says the woman whose blanket is simply draped over her legs, a jacket zipped up to her neck, fingers around a mug of her own. “I’m afraid the blanket will take a moment to heat up.”
Vi takes a sip of the drink. Oh, that’s a lovely dark chocolate. Ghanaian? Maybe Costa Rican. More likely a blend, if she’s honest. Very tasty in any case and, most importantly, it warms her up from the inside.
“Why are you here, Vi?”
Vi looks through the glass of the balcony out, down to the sand, down to the waves below them. The barking has long since stopped which means Jayce is either dead or entirely free from whatever trap it was that he’d been caught in. She hopes it is the latter because the bag she brought might not fit him. It probably will but those shoulders, man. That’ll be a heavy load for sure.
“Well,” she says. “Jayce—”
“Don’t jump!”
They both jump a little in their seats. The delicious hot cocoa almost sloshes right over her fingers. Almost, because Vi has good reflexes.
“Cait, wait, don’t do it, we love—” the balcony door is flung wide open and Jayce is there, hair mussed, his weapon slung at his side, hands grabbing tightly onto the metal frame of the sliding doors “—you!”
A blur shoots past him, yipping as it barrels right past Vi’s legs up and into her companion’s lap.
The woman laughs, laughs out into the cool ocean air, holding her mug up with one hand while she reaches to scritch at the head of the puppy that Vi knows now to be Sandy. In the early morning blue with her hair tossed about her face by the seabreeze, smiling wide like Vi’s never seen her to, this woman is magnetic and Vi cannot look away, doesn’t want to, hasn’t ever wanted to.
“Surely you must be aware that I know that, Jayce.”
“Yeah but—” now his eyes fall upon Vi.
“Sup,” says Vi with a little wave of her mug. She delights in watching his eyes flick between the two of them before his face falls into a pout.
Jayce grumbles something unintelligible though he shuffles closer first and wraps the woman into the largest bear hug Vi has seen in a long, long time. She watches her arms wrap back around him, watches the squeeze, feels a warmth well up inside her that has nothing at all to do with the drink in her hand.
It feels a little like intruding, a lot like she’s not supposed to be here for this.
“You owe me breakfast, Caity.”
The woman laughs again.
“Well, ladies,” Jayce says as he straightens up. “I will be downstairs. Please do try not to kill each other. Cait, I asked Vi for help so it’s not her fault.”
“Considering I haven’t already killed her what makes you think I’ll start now?”
Jayce simply holds his hands up, smiles, and steps back into what Vi knows must be the warmth of the house.
“So,” says the woman leaning against the glass, blanket draped around her shoulders. “Jayce tracked you down. You have my apologies.”
“To be fair,” Vi says. “He tracked you down. I don’t know the specifics and I didn’t ask.” She pauses. “He has a tracker in your guns would be my guess.”
The woman nods. Behind her the ocean has begun to wake.
“There’s one in the shotgun in the shed. ”
Vi pauses, cup inches from her lips.
“You knew.”
“I’ve stripped enough to know what they’re supposed to feel like,” she says as she takes a sip. “Jayce isn’t as slick as he thinks he is, has never been, really. I’ve been expecting him.”
Vi watches the bob of her throat in a swallow, then takes a sip of her own. The cocoa is now a little less hot and a little more… tepid but it’s still tasty, still rich.
“But I did not expect you.”
The statement tilts up into a question. Vi knows, and decides just to shrug.
“Not much point in lying,” says the woman. “Jayce only said please and I assume you drove here with a body bag in the car.”
Vi’s fingers still at the threat, then she catches the twinkle of amusement in the one eye not covered by an eyepatch. That’s new. She wonders if it has anything to do with the reason why they're here, why they're not trawling the ocean for a body to put in said body bag.
“Jayce came by after Christmas,” Vi says. “He’s kind of an idiot, just straight up asked me if I’d killed you.”
A soft scoff.
“Oh come now, you know I’d be able to do some damage.”
“Some,” comes the clearly patronizing word. “You’re so out of practice I almost killed you.”
“I said no,” Vi presses on to preserve some of her pride, “But he begged me to contact him if you dropped by again even though we both know you wouldn’t, left his number and his real name, which y’know, idiot. Burned it, of course.”
The woman hums.
“There was a period of time where I was hoping you would, you know?”
“There was?”
She shrugs, smiles, takes another sip. “Yes,” she says. “There was.”
Vi doesn’t push. She takes another sip of her own cocoa, swallows down the past tense like it is the nectar of the gods, tries to keep her hand from shaking.
“He said you were family,” she says. “And well, I guess I’ve always been soft for family.”
“Soft enough to risk your own?”
Vi shrugs, looking down at the floor because she knows her eyes give her away. Her eyes always give her away.
Her ears fill with the sea.
“Wasn’t much of a risk,” she says.
“You flew here on my dime, sit here on my balcony, cozy under my blanket, drinking the cocoa I made, and still you lie to me,” says the voice that’s now startlingly close, teasing laughter threaded through each clearly sliced syllable. “All this and I haven’t even given you my name.”
Vi knows her ears turn red, knows her haircut doesn't hide them, knows she's defenseless.
“You're a huge softie,” Caitlyn Kiramman says.
Vi grimaces.
“But I suppose that's what drew me to you.”
Now Vi looks up at the smiling blue of the sea, the clouds starting to be painted on their undersides with the barest brushes of orange.
She feels her heart quiet, fills her lungs with the air of the rising dawn.
“Where'd you go?” she says.
Caitlyn's head tilts. She doesn't answer immediately. How she knows Vi has more to say, how she knows the answer doesn’t actually matter, Vi herself doesn't know. Does that make it better?
Worse?
She's not sure.
“You didn't come back,” the next few words spill out.
The quietest hitch of breath.
“You haven't had one of my croissants yet.”
Caitlyn's eye widens.
“You could,” Vi says, holding her gaze as the sun peeks over the horizon. “If you'd like.”