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It was like deja vu. Horrible, sickening deja vu, like a waking nightmare of somewhere she’d been before. Staggering through the streets, agony lancing through her insides. Only this time, she was the one holding up someone else. This time, the pain had nothing to do with physical wounds, and everything to do with the knowledge that her whole world had erupted. Like seven years ago. Like seventeen years ago. Like last week.
“She’s like his daughter.”
“Mylo was right.”
The sound of gauntlets striking armor, crushing flesh. A blank, lifeless face in the smoke.
Vi stumbled. Caught her weight and Caitlyn’s, shook herself back to the present. Pressing matters. Caitlyn, wounded, in more ways than one. Behind them, rising beneath a blood moon, a tower in flames. A tower she’d hated once. A tower she’d seen the inside of, and realized just how small she was after all. A tower whose destruction she would’ve celebrated even seventy-two hours ago.
Not now. Not now that she knew some of the names of the people inside it. Not now that she knew what those people meant to Caitlyn. Those people who had been lost to the flames. She knew what that was like.
She couldn’t vomit. Not here. Not now. Not with Caitlyn dark-eyed and wordless, heavy against her side, blood drying on her upper lip, crusting her nostril. As Vi looked at her, she saw the paint flecks on her cheeks, neon and ugly against the dirt and tear tracks.
Caitlyn pushed hair from her face and left a broad swath of blood behind.
Vi felt her heart drop.
“Hey,” she said. “Hey. Hey.”
Short search and she found Caitlyn’s hands. Good hands, skilled with a gun, gentle and warm and untouched by the world.
Til now.
There was so much blood. She couldn’t find where it was coming from, the streets were so dark, but it dripped between Caitlyn’s fingers, slid down the leather of her gloves.
“Okay,” Vi said. “You’re okay.”
She dropped her gauntlet with a clang and a hiss, hastily unwrapping her arm wraps, ripping off a long swath with her teeth, balling it up and pressing it into Caitlyn’s palm.
“Hold onto this.”
Caitlyn held on. There was a flicker of pain in her expression, but Vi couldn’t tell if Caitlyn even noticed. She did the same thing with another swath of wrap, pushing it gently into her other hand. Caitlyn closed her fingers around it.
Vi felt exposed with the short remnant of her wrap dangling from her wrist. She ignored it, picked up her gauntlet, heavier than it had ever been, and put her arm around Caitlyn’s waist again.
“Let’s get you cleaned up, kay, cupcake?”
Caitlyn made a small sound. Not a word, more of an abbreviated hum. Good enough, probably.
Vi guided them through the streets. All so familiar, even after all this time. It was a long shot - seven years was a long time - but it was the only shot she had. Caitlyn was bleeding, and it was Vi’s fault. Caitlyn had been kidnapped, and it was Vi’s fault. Caitlyn was concussed, and traumatized, and her mom was dead, and it was Vi’s fault.
My fault, my fault, my fault, my fault.
Vi took a breath, like coming up for air. She couldn’t do this. Not now. She didn’t have the luxury of an isolated cell. She didn’t have hours to waste falling into her own darkness. The world was burning, and her sister was lost, but Caitlyn was here.
“You with me?” Vi asked, hefting Caitlyn’s arm more securely over her shoulders.
Caitlyn didn’t look at her, eyes on the ground, cheek glistening with her own blood.
“‘M with you,” she said, her voice low and hollow.
“Okay,” Vi said, and her throat felt tight.
The building was still there, wedged down a back alley, the surrounding buildings all shuttered. But still there. That was a good sign. The door creaked and opened like it was reluctant to let anyone in, and slammed shut again once they were through. Vi dropped her gauntlet in front of it to keep it closed, and helped Caitlyn deeper into the house. Tried for a light in the kitchen, once they were further from windows. The dusty yellow bulb flickered on, and Vi’s throat tightened further. She sat Caitlyn at the old table and went to the designated cupboard.
She didn’t cry. Or, well. She didn’t let the tears fall, at least. As she pulled out the bulging medical kit, she blinked past the blurring in her eyes. Zaun was a shithole, always had been, but there was kindness in the cracks. Even Silco and his shimmer and seven years of degradation couldn’t take that away. Couldn’t burn away the evidence that there were still people here. Still humans. This kit was proof – trenchers could still take care of each other, in small, quiet ways. In replenishing communal first-aid kits. In leaving electricity on in houses where no one lived.
Caitlyn was staring at her hands, still balled in fists around the wraps, when Vi pulled up a chair opposite her. Her knuckles were crimson and trembling a little. Vi uncurled her grasp gently, removing the reddened wraps. The bleeding had slowed, and in the yellow light Vi could see the wounds more clearly. Long slashes crossed Caitlyn’s right hand, cutting through the leather of her glove over her palm, and the soft inner skin of her knuckles. Her left hand wasn’t as bad, a messier series of cuts jagging across her fingers and fingertips, but it was still enough to make Vi’s stomach turn.
The wine glass. Vi remembered now, through the haze of terror she’d been sunk in. The glinting, half-shattered glass that Caitlyn had snuck off the table. Her fierce expression, even over the mask on her face, as she’d worked at her bonds, her hands hidden beneath the table.
This was the aftermath. Physical evidence. The kind that left scars.
“We gotta get these off first,” she said.
She worked the leather of Caitlyn’s long Enforcer gloves away from her skin, tugging a little at a time near the fingers. They were well fitted, but malleable enough. Well-worn. Ruined, now. Caitlyn would have to get a new pair.
A short sound from Caitlyn’s lips. Half a moan, half a gasp.
“I know,” Vi said. She was trying to be careful. Her fingers were shaking. She slowed, but she didn’t stop. The gloves had to come off. “I know it doesn’t feel good.”
“It’s alright,” Caitlyn said, and it wasn’t, Vi was hurting her, Vi would just keep hurting her, and she wished she was back home, stabbed and dying with an unharmed Caitlyn, a Caitlyn who hadn’t been hollowed out, a Caitlyn who said those words – “It’s alright” – and they were real, they were true.
The gloves finally came away, one at a time, and the cuts were even worse like this, stark and ugly against the unmarked skin of Caitlyn’s hands. Caitlyn sat still and patient, closing her eyes tight as Vi rinsed the cuts with throws of clear alcohol, as Vi inspected them for any remaining shards in the low light. The tweezers hovered and plucked, slow, careful.
“In Stillwater, it was always easy to see what got leftover,” she said. “Stone and gravel are easy to pick out. One guy got a tooth stuck in his hand once.”
When the shards were cleared away, Vi wiped the bleeding, pressed a rag in place to stop it. She threaded a needle.
“Haven’t done this in a while. Not a lot of needles in prison, we usually just made do with making our uniforms into bandages.”
The needle slipped clean through Caitlyn’s skin. Made a small white hole through the dried blood. She tried to keep the stitches even. She wished her hands would stop shaking.
Caitlyn wasn’t looking at her. She was staring out the window, her other hand clenched around a rag in her lap.
“My mom taught me to sew,” Vi said, “but Vander kept me in practice. Big man like him, wouldn’t have expected it. But he knew how to mend clothes with the best of them. Knew how to mend wounds, too, and I guess that made more sense. Had me sew him up once after he got jumped by someone in the street. They weren’t in their right mind, he said. He didn’t call the Enforcers on them, just took their knife and got them a meal.”
The needle pricked her finger. She didn’t even feel it.
“I was scared as hell. He wasn’t bleeding bad, but it was a big cut. Benzo was out of town, I think that’s why he came to me. He talked me through it, told me I did a good job. I think he was just glad to know that I knew how to do it. That he had that confirmation, you know? In case I ever needed to do it for someone else, and he couldn’t be there.”
She wished Vander was here. If Vander was here, he’d know what to do. He’d be able to help. He’d sew up Caitlyn’s hands in lines that weren’t this unsure and jagged.
“I’m sorry, Caitlyn,” Vi was saying. Barely a whisper, but her throat burned. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Caitlyn’s hand closed over Vi’s, holding her still. Vi looked up at her, and her blue eyes were darker than they’d ever been, and her expression was locked in a mask of emptiness, but her hand was steady as it squeezed around Vi’s fingers.
Vi lowered her head to Caitlyn’s knuckles. Not to beg. Just to rest. To let the weight settle on her back. To remember how to shoulder it.
Then she sat up, and she finished pulling closed the parts of Caitlyn that had split open. The ones she could see. The ones a needle and thread could touch. This, at least, she could do.