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The rifle that had once been so solid, so sure, in her hands was now unfamiliar. The weight: unbalanced. The sight: drifting and unrecognizable. Caitlyn steadied her breath, steeled her gaze, and tightened her grip, but the mass in her hands felt foreign and unwieldy.
Her mother shifted behind her, a slight exhale escaping through her nose. The crunching leaves which soundtracked their hike into this clearing silenced when their steps stopped. The soil smelled full and wet and moisture began its slow seep upward into the fabric of her pants through the knee she dug into the soft ground.
She braced again.
“Commit,” came her mother’s voice, barely a whisper through the electric air but all the more commanding for it. Yards away, the young deer’s head jerked at the word, ears flickering, black eyes staring across the distance straight through where their hunting party froze stock-still.
Caitlyn had only shot targets until this moment. The brightly painted wood held little in common with the animal before them, alive and warm and so blissfully unaware. Blood or breath or some unnamed vitality thundered behind her ribs as she pressed her ear to the rifle, the smooth finish of the gun against her head a static shock.
Commit.
She took a breath and was surprised to hear it shaky and unrecognizable out of her parted lips.
Commit.
The rifle exploded beneath her hands, the kickback knocking into her shoulder with a staggering force. She dug her toes into the soil and managed to hold true.
The quiet was gone, wrenched painfully from its slumber by Caitlyn’s finger which was still trembling on the trigger. In its place a horrible, curdling, wet sound filled the air.
Caitlyn gasped and the rifle fell from her shoulder. She looked upon the deer and the gaping hole she’d opened in its neck. Blood spurted in rhythm with each shuddering heartbeat. Its knees buckled and it fell chest first to the ground.
Another scream—gargling and saturated—escaped its mouth.
She realized then that she had no idea what sound a deer usually made; if they even made any sounds at all.
From then on all she’d know was this squalling death rattle she’d gifted—ugly and horrifying and dripping red.
--
For a brief moment she’s back in those woods, knees wet and pants dirty, her mother behind her while tears well in stinging eyes. A deer screaming through the trees in its last moments, choking on its pain.
But then the sky, aflame—a missile, blazing blue—and that strangled, wet scream is no one’s but her own.
She clenches and contracts, sending all the blood she has left pulsing into her throat, her mouth, her pounding ears. Her eyes feel as if they may pop from the strain but she can’t stop can’t stop can’t stop this vicious sound being wrenched from her body.
It rips through the sky, pathetic and impotent compared to the buzzing blue streak arcing downward now, aim unwavering.
Vi quakes beside her and she turns to catch her grey eyes, wide and broken and split clean through. A flash of remembrance jolts Caitlyn, of battered eyes through iron bars, a strip of light just enough to illuminate all of Vi’s pain and resolve and fear. A body expecting a fist only to receive a caress, unsure what to do with something so unexpected.
It breaks her heart all over again.
Caitlyn sees the contact before she hears it, reflected like a mirror in Vi’s pupils. The familiar grey is gone in a flash, a gleam of lightning blue slicing across her irises.
Caitlyn turns and the top of the tower explodes, shatters, crumbles, huge chunks of rock starting in on themselves. The wreck is silent from this distance and for a brief moment there is only the sound of her throat turning hoarse from use. But then, like a rush, the sound catches up and there’s a muffled bang, a rumble, and the shaking collapse of a tower a world away–
And so there’s nothing left for her to add, no sound left for Caitlyn to make. She buries her head into Vi’s neck and lets her body release with a sigh.
--
Caitlyn froze, guilt and shame and fear hurtling through her veins. She felt her mother’s eyes on her back but she couldn’t bring herself to lift the rifle again. It hung pointlessly at her side.
Desperate, the animal kicked its back legs out in a final attempt to escape the inevitable. They spasmed behind it, knees jutting out at all the wrong angles. Its effort only served to push its heavy head into the ground and Caitlyn’s jaw slackened, her eyes unable to look anywhere but. Its gurgling became more muffled the harder it pushed until it was just a whimpering song sung into the dirt.
Her mother motioned to the guard stationed behind them. He pulled out her rifle and handed it to her in a single, swift motion. She strode past Caitlyn cemented in the leaves and soil. Her mother’s back was ramrod straight and her arms decisive. She held the rifle to her ear and steadied her aim but first, she turned back to look at her daughter over the butt of the gun, eyes narrow and stern.
“You’re a better shot than that,” and with it, she turned to fire.
This time the bullet went straight through the deer’s skull. Everything stilled and the silence from earlier returned, welcomed home with eager arms.
Caitlyn was glad for it to be over.
Her mother gave a quick and purposeful nod, appreciating her work. She swung the rifle back around and the guard scurried forward, a handkerchief in his hand to wipe the weapon down and away.
“Send for the rest of the party to take this one back to the cabin with us for cleaning.” She motioned for Caitlyn, still stuck uselessly in the dirt, to follow her.
--
What surprises her now is the ash floating down across the bridge like snowflakes landing in a field. That day in the woods had been crisp, wet, like the last throw of fall before winter settled. Now it feels as if winter is finally upon them but no, it’s distorted and ugly and seething. A winter of red skies and charcoal instead of white flurries and baby blue.
They’re still a ways from the tower but the ash makes the trek to greet them, beckoning the pair forward, onward. Caitlyn looks from the red clouds to Vi’s soft face still numb with disbelief. Vi shoulders Caitlyn’s heavy steps with an arm secure around her waist and she wonders how peculiar the circumstances have been, how they’ve carried each other now back and forth across the two cities. She wishes she could map their trails, count the miles.
“Vi,” she says, surprised to hear the strength in her voice for all the screaming she’d done earlier. “Vi, let’s stop. I need a moment.”
Vi grunts and they make their way to the edge of the bridge. Caitlyn leans against the wall and Vi shimmies out from under her arm. She releases the gauntlet she’d been wearing and collapses back beside her. She looks small.
“Enforcers will be here soon, we can’t stay long,” Vi says, voice careful, even.
Caitlyn nods in agreement and turns her chin to the sky, closing her eyes. The flurries ghost across her face, her eyelashes. She thinks morbidly of what part of the walls, what part of the structure, what part of her life, bore this ash.
She feels Vi studying her, trying to decode whatever mystery she’s written across her face. Caitlyn turns to her and her heavy heart swells with affection. She lifts a hand to cup Vi’s cheek, holding her there like something precious. Her fingernails are dirty and black.
Vi flinches in response, unexpected and unsure. It breaks Caitlyn’s heart again, without fail.
Caitlyn wants to say, I dragged us into this, I should have committed. She wants to say, I wish I’d been stronger, I wish I did for us what you couldn’t, wouldn’t, won’t.
She wants to say, Please just stay.
But then Vi softens and her brow furrows and she sees the set in her beautiful, broken, determined face and Caitlyn knows, really knows, that Vi says the same things back to her.
Her chest aches with it, raw with grief, and the walls of her heart start in on themselves like the tower had, all dust and concrete and death.
She catches Vi glance behind her, stealing a look at the scene in Piltover that continues.
Vi says, “I’m so sorry,” and Caitlyn wishes she hadn’t, wishes Vi didn't have another apology to add to her growing list, wishes instead she could wrap her up in her arms and say, no no no.
Instead Caitlyn says, “I’m sorry too,” and with it she means, for your loss, for my loss, for all of this. But as the words roll over in her mouth they take on a different meaning, one Vi doesn’t yet know.
Caitlyn says it again, “I’m sorry,” but this time what she means is, for what I have to do next.
--
Caitlyn rose from the dirt as if pulled from above like a marionette. She felt herself gliding wordlessly and then she was standing above the deer. The leaves below the animal were coated in thick, shining blood, dark red and slick. Hher mother stood a steady presence beside her.
“I-” Caitlyn swallowed, “I got scared.”
Her mother sighed and straightened even taller. How could she always seem so tall?
“I know, darling,” her mother countered, but there was a warmth in her tone now, one that Caitlyn wasn’t often privy to. It felt like a small kindness, one Caitlyn struggled to accept. “Your great-grandfather was the first to invest the Kirammans’ industry into the production of firearms and ammunition. It was a considerable boon for the family then and it has maintained its profitability since.” She eyed her daughter up and down. “He cared nothing for rifles but he cared greatly for opportunity.”
Her mother rarely spoke without saying Kiramman at least once. Caitlyn wondered if perhaps it was the word she’d heard most repeated in her short life so far, wondered perhaps if it was the first word she’d ever even said as a child. Ha, she thought, tongue bitter, mother would have loved that.
Caitlyn surveyed the deer in its final stillness, in its rest. Its black eyes stayed open wide and glassy below the bits of flesh that were blown back and away from the hole through its skull. The swell of blood from its neck matted into its brown fur. It looked peaceful in its sick way.
“You, Caitlyn,” she continued, “You have a great proclivity for the shooting sports. It’s no secret and it will serve you well should you choose to pursue it. But I saw your aim waver—why didn’t you take it between the eyes? I’ve seen you hit targets twice the distance with twice the precision.” Her question was sharp, more like the tone of voice with which Caitlyn was familiar.
Caitlyn found no answer. Instead, she defended, “I didn’t want to come at all, you know that.” Her free hand balled into a fist and a hot wave of shame centered there.
“My grandfather only became a hunting man once he’d already started the rifle business, and even then he rarely went. I remember begging him the morning of my first trip, pleading not to make me go.”
Caitlyn looked up at that.
“He said to me, ‘You can shoot targets all day Cassandra but you’d be a fool to think the course is the only place these rifles will be used. They will lodge themselves into lives, they will end beautiful things. You’re to know what we’re selling.’” She chuckled darkly, remembering. “It was an awful thing to say to a young girl.”
Through the trees they heard the rest of the party returning, the crunching leaves alerting them to their presence. It must have been almost noon by then.
“He didn’t make me go many more times after and for that I was thankful… the same as you’ll be, I’m sure.” She placed a gloved hand on the back of Caitlyn’s neck and the voice she used was warm again, “You have a sweetness we should be careful not to sour with such bloody things.”
“I’m a better shot than that,” Caitlyn said, a resolve returning from where it was lost.
They both stared at the dead creature with a last, consecrated look.
“When it’s time to end something beautiful, your precision is the final gift you can give, darling.”
--
They make it as close as they can. The scene around them plays out as expected, set pieces moving as if on wheels pushed by stagehands changing between acts. A frenzied rescue crew, a lone child screaming, a man stumbling out from the direction of the wreckage, dazed and staggering and covered in ash.
Vi stutters, “I don’t- I don’t even know where to start.”
Caitlyn drops with that, buckling to the ground. Her knees press into the thickening layer of soot that gathers. “I don’t either.”
She examines Vi, unabashed. The fingers on her working gauntlet twitch as if planning their next move, her gaze darting to take in the chaos unfolding, her shoulder drooping to betray an injury Vi’s carried wordlessly. Caitlyn takes her in fully, into her raw heart that’s singed like it’s been struck by lightning. She decides to hold Vi there.
Commit.
Caitlyn thinks, She just wants to help, despite it all . Caitlyn thinks, She deserved better.
Vi looks at her then and Caitlyn’s broken heart shatters with the weight.
Caitlyn thinks, I should be good to her.
But then she’s back in that cold rain, hesitating. Feet stuck to the ground and defeated. A regret.
Then she’s back in that warehouse, pointing a gun at Vi’s sister but shooting the ground. A warning, a peace. A fatal miscalculation.
Commit.
And finally, she’s back in her room on that fall morning before the hunt, sitting on her bed with her knees pulled up to her chin, small then, and so young. Her mother’s there in the doorway, a memory only—a memory maybe forever, Caitlyn realizes—and her throat clogs with grief.
“Come, Caitlyn,” her mother says, “We’re off for the hunt-”
And Caitlyn can only hope Vi will understand.
--