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I (anneal)
She doesn’t cry.
Not when the darkness of the night sky is shattered in an explosion of light and glass and death. Not when Vi half drags, half carries her battered body back topside in the chaos that quiets to an eerie stillness inside the Kiramman estate. Not even when the hot water she’s dipping pristine white hand towels into scalds the tips of her fingers, or when the rising steam revives Jinx’s handiwork on the smooth mirror only to be hastily scrubbed away by Vi’s sooty sleeve.
It leaves grey streaks on the silvery surface, ashen and oily like the first layer of grime she wipes away from her hands and face before fumbling with the buckles on her jacket. Her stiff fingers are brushed away by calloused hands that make surprisingly quick work of the complicated fastenings.
She can see how Vi would be a good sister, Caitlyn thinks as her uniform jacket gets tossed aside, the buttons clinking against the tile like buckshot. It leaves her in the thin camisole she usually wears to bed, neon smeared across the silk from where thieving fingers tossed it at her feet only hours ago.
Get dressed, toots.
Vi’s gaze flicks up to hers, a flash of dark quicksilver like the gleam of gun oil on a rifle’s barrel and Caitlyn watches as a bitten down fingernail scrapes almost imperceptibly at a slash of fluorescent blue. Without thinking about it, she ignores the wrenching pain in her left shoulder to pull the top off, relegating it to the floor. She’ll burn it later.
It’s funny how being half naked feels less vulnerable than sitting there with the evidence of her own failure clinging to her skin in an illusion of modesty. She grabs a roll of bandages to wrap her almost certainly broken ribs and says nothing when Vi takes that from her too.
Hands wind the cloth around her abdomen with a gentleness that feels like a contradiction from that deadly grasp, and that itself would be infuriating if all of Caitlyn’s anger wasn’t otherwise occupied right now.
Knuckles brush the underside of her breast and an involuntary prickle of goosebumps trembles across her skin but for once she’s numb to anything, everything this pink haired woman can do to her.
Vi’s avoiding her eyes, avoiding looking at anything but the task before her, which means that Caitlyn can look at her all she wants, so she does. She catalogues each scar and freckle, calculates the angle of the scar that cuts through her top lip, traces the shape of each tattoo with a sniper’s patience and thinks that this is funny too, this brute of a woman named Violet. She wonders if her mother gave her that name, wonders what that faceless woman would think of her daughters now.
Pain blooms, sudden and white hot, and she tells herself it’s just because Vi is tying off the end of the bandage, but her sharp inhale doesn’t go unnoticed in the silence.
“Shit, did I - I’m - ”
Sorry hangs in the air between them, heavy and ill-fitting.
Caitlyn pushes herself up off the edge of the bathtub, ignoring the ache of her ribs and her leg and her everything, embraces the hurt because it stops her throat long enough to swallow the are you? back down. It wouldn’t be fair, even if she is less sure than ever of what that word even means.
There’s a row of clean enforcer’s uniforms hanging neatly, evenly spaced in her wardrobe. She chooses a plain crisp shirt and the hunting jacket at the end of the line instead, tightens the leather holster around her until the straps feel rigid enough to hold her upright.
“I need to find my father,” she says, relieved when her voice doesn’t falter or crack, doesn’t betray any sign of the scream that is still echoing in her own ears. “You should stay here. It won’t be safe for you.” (Now, ever, anymore, take your pick, she doesn’t say but they both hear it anyway.)
“Cait-”
Her bedroom door clicks shut behind her, a flimsy barrier between the woman she leaves inside and the world beyond but she’s not really sure who she’s protecting from whom anyway.
Things have officially gone to shit.
Growing up in Zaun, hearing the adults talk about the fucking Pilties and those piece of shit enforcers made it easy to imagine some kind of fantasy world where topside just disappeared at best and got their due at worst, where the heartless rich finally felt the weight of whatever suffering their fragile shoulders could bear once the protection of money and power got stripped away. Maybe it’s because things like justice have never seemed to mean the same to her as they did for others.
Vander. Ekko. Even Sevika.
Maybe it’s because she’s too selfish or too stupid, maybe she’s caught too many fists with her face, but the truth is that Vi doesn’t really give a shit about big words like independence and autonomy. She cares about the people she cares about being safe. Which has worked out just so fucking well for her so far.
Looking back, she should have known that she would lose Powder too because her death toll can be counted in the lines of her name and the ink on her cheek has become a marker for the dead.
So maybe that’s why the blow against Piltover doesn’t feel like a victory. How can it, when it comes in the shape of a sister she doesn’t recognize, a pained silhouette in azure relief, and when Caitlyn -
The anguish in Caitlyn’s cry feels like a knife slipping between her ribs every time she thinks of it. And she can’t stop thinking of it. It’s the latest addition to the collection of memories she can’t escape, Vi’s own personal stereoscope reel of nightmares.
Her mind plays the soundtrack against the inside of her eardrums, echoing and haunting her in its aftermath and it’s all just so fucking loud in the deafening silence that fills the cavernous building that only a Piltie would call a house.
It’s too quiet in this gilded palace, too still and calm to drown out the thoughts, the frenetic energy that keeps her pacing, keeps her hands clenching over and over, grasping at nothing.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
She catches sight of herself in the doorway to the bathroom, reflected in the cloudy mirror she’d only half-cleaned. It’s a ludicrous image - the rough trencher framed by gleaming opulence, an intruder at odds with everything around her.
The walls close in as the buzzing in her ears grows to an angry roar, as her vision blurs in a salty burn, as her chest tightens in a painful knot -
- as the silvered glass splinters and shatters beneath her fist.
“Fuck!”
The shards cut her reflection into pieces at odd ugly angles that don’t quite fit together, hard and angry and mocking. She squeezes her eyes shut but she can’t stop seeing it anyway - her own face in mottled steel, horror in neon paint, the puppet placeholders for ghosts that won’t stop reminding her that all she ever seems to do is fail.
Vi tells herself it’s a mercy when she shoves the window open and swings a leg out into the cool darkness beyond.
(She tells herself nothing when she glances at the unmade bed and turns away.)
She leaves destruction in her wake, because that is all she has ever done. It’s all she knows how to do.
A week ago, she would have been on duty, maybe. Something asinine, if she’d irritated the Sheriff again. Something safe and out of the way and just shy of completely pointless for the Kiramman heir that wants to play cop.
A week ago, her theory of corrupt topside involvement in an undercity contraband ring existed only in her head and on her bedroom floor, and she’d only heard whispers of something called shimmer.
A week ago, her mother was still correcting her form.
(Skliiikt. Click. BANG.)
The range automatically changes out the target before sliding back another fifty metres.
Center your balance, Caitlyn. Ground yourself.
Her vision narrows, sharpens to the time and space held within the sight of her rifle. The world falls away like it always does for the nanoseconds where instinct takes over and she isn’t Caitlyn anymore, she is as cold and unyielding as the weapon she becomes.
Lift your elbow. Breathe. Hold.
The deadened boom reverberates inside her with the shuddering recoil, the shift of metal and oil as familiar as the bend of her own fingers. It vibrates against her bones, trembles along the sinew and marrow before being swallowed in the void that sits somewhere centre mass.
(Clink.)
Once burning hot with gunpowder and force, the spent casing clatters on the polished concrete, metal already cool to a touch that isn’t coming. The tip of her boot sends it skittering away to join the others, adding to the growing pile in the corner, a little collection of gleaming golden, used and useless shells.
She reloads smoothly, sliding another round into the chamber, long fingers moving with a familiarity as easy as breathing. The bolt locks into place and the click reminds her of a closed door in another part of the house, a room she called hers but hasn’t stepped into since she returned to find it empty a week ago.
The thought poisons her bloodstream like adrenaline, makes her aware of her pulse thrumming in her throat, the bitter taste on her tongue, the storm that threatens to test her resolve. But if there is any part of her at risk of weakening, of buckling and collapsing, it’s reinforced and galvanized and steeled by the firm strength of her mother’s voice that she hears as clearly as the shot that rings out.
Again.
II (quench)
She’s not entirely sure what she’s doing.
Truthfully, that’s usually the case, but it’s never bothered her before now. The list of her priorities in the last six years haven’t really extended far past one, survive, and two, find Powder.
The basics of survival are far easier to come by when you’re a rare veteran of Stillwater and not the fifteen year old they’d thrown in, and as for finding Powder…
Well, she found her all right. Kinda.
Even now, confronted with the destruction and devastation she’d left in her wake, she’s still struggling to put together the image of the sweet, earnest little girl she’d left behind with the volatile menace she’d returned to.
Murderer. Monster. Terrorist. (Jinx.)
Topside - and if she’s honest, the undercity - has no shortage of words to describe her sister. And if she’s the kind of honest that usually takes half a dozen shots of the strongest gutrot the Lanes has to offer, she can’t really refute any of them.
She wants to cling to something trite, like if you really knew her or she’s just different but six years is a long time and it’s finally starting to sink in that she knows Powder inside and out but Jinx is a stranger. Maybe that was her mistake, maybe it’s always been her mistake, thinking that she knows.
Maybe that’s why it’s always her fault. And maybe it’s why she’s hovering here, at the edge between Piltover and Zaun, unable to stay but somehow unable to go either.
Which leads her here. Lost. Stuck. Whatever word you want to use the describe the state of utter fucking uselessness that is her right now.
And Vi has never been great at being useless.
She drowns the feeling with dark alcohol that’s poured from unlabelled bottles behind a bar that cares more about coin than it does the origin of its patrons, and when the inevitable scrap breaks out, she savours the tang of blood and the sting of torn knuckles and the bruises that blossom the next day that feel like the least she deserves.
There’s a scream trapped somewhere between her ribs, but no one seems to be able to hit her hard enough to wrench it free.
Some nights, she goes back to the window, slips back inside the room that feels like safety and like a trap, soothed and repelled in turns. It’s unchanged and untidied and that feels like…something. Something she can’t think about too hard because it’s way easier to sit here on the floor with her back to the bed and her eyes on the too dark sky and a stolen flask that empties too quickly.
She always leaves before the walls can close in, before the nightmares can taunt her into destroying something, anything, everything she can reach.
Until she doesn’t.
Until the drink or the one really good hit that one guy got in or her own fucking inability to not fuck up finds her waking to daylight and the sound of footsteps.
She has one dirty boot on the windowsill when the door opens and she freezes despite every fibre of her being telling her to get out because again, she’s a fucking idiot.
“Vi?”
If asked, Caitlyn isn’t sure if she’d thought she would ever see Vi again. And now that she has, she isn’t even sure if the knot she feels somewhere in her throat is a good or a bad thing.
She lowers her mother’s rifle and feels stronger for it even as the shift makes her acutely aware of how brittle she feels in this moment.
Vi’s still in the window, neither in nor out, halfway gone already. Again.
“You can go if you want,” she says, her voice cool and even, because Caitlyn has never felt the urge to keep before and she’ll be damned if she starts now.
She considers retreating to the other side of the open door if that would help, if it would be easier to walk away again and return later to the empty room she should have expected the first time. It would be courteous, even, a kindness to a woman whose grip on the window frame would splinter a lesser wood in its rigidity.
But she doesn’t. Instead, she’s rooted to the floor, watching as Vi hesitates, waiting as those battered fingers unclench, those shoulders drop with a fatigue that Caitlyn feels acutely.
Bloodshot grey eyes lift to meet hers and she feels that forceful tug behind her sternum that she’d almost managed to forget about. It pulls her forward, just a step and then two before she can stop herself.
“Are you hungry?”
She doesn’t wait for a response and tries to ignore the way the back of her neck prickles with heat as she makes her way to the kitchens and can feel the footsteps tracing her own.
It’s still early and the water she fills the kettle with is stone cold; the hob flame burns bright and hot but it still buys her an extra minute or two to take unnecessary care with measuring out coffee grounds and cutting exactly equal slides of the nut studded bread her father prefers.
She sets out milk and cream and three kinds of sugar and isn’t at all surprised when Vi ignores all of them and takes a gulp that must scald her tongue, but doesn’t stop her from going back for more.
Her own cup feels too hot against her frigid fingers but she forces herself to hold on anyway.
“Where have you been?” She tries not to sound accusatory but she’s still Cassandra Kiramman’s daughter.
Vi shrugs, tearing the thick bread into smaller and smaller pieces. “Around.”
The nonchalance has Caitlyn’s teeth on edge and her grip tightening until her palms are burning.
But then Vi looks up at her from beneath that stupidly unkempt fringe and the corner of that scarred lip twitches slightly and then she says, “You look tired, Cupcake.”
And Caitlyn bloody hates that she can feel her hard won detachment slip just a little, that the low rasp of Vi’s voice that sounds like care threatens to crack open the part of her that’s still sitting at that table, still staggering across the bridge, still choking back tears and hurt and everything she doesn’t need right now.
Her fingers find the bandage wrapped around her thigh and press hard enough to clear her vision.
She blames the early morning chill and the lack of sleep and a whole host of other things she’ll think of later for the words that fall out of her mouth next.
“My mother’s funeral is tomorrow. Will you come?”
There’s more shiny stuff here, just like everything else topside, and more fake ass people than she can count, but when she sees the way Tobias’ whole body seems to bow under an invisible weight, Vi thinks that grief looks much the same on both sides of the bridge.
Caitlyn, though -
Something’s different about her, something that doesn’t feel like sorrow or loss or any of the other words people use when someone dies.
She’s colder, closed off and impenetrable in the way Vi expected her to be when Caitlyn was just the Piltie enforcer on the other side of the cell bars. It makes her want to take those rigid shoulders into her hands and shake until that stony exterior cracks and something, anything spills out that resembles the woman who broke her out of Stillwater on the strength of a hunch.
It’s what keeps her here, hovering on the edge of a ceremony more complicated than the one she knows, but is still familiar in a way that makes her ache.
She waits.
III (temper)
It rains, and no less than seven people apparently feel compelled to comment on how fitting the weather is, you poor dear. She nods and shakes hands and lets the protocol of a High House funeral move her like an automaton until it’s finally over.
She turns away from the newly turned earth to give her father time alone and tries not to think about the way it feels like he’s aged a decade overnight when he squeezes her shoulder.
Umbrellas were set out for guests but Vi stands in the open, a lone figure covered only by a hood darkened over hours by the slow rain; Caitlyn’s been acutely aware of her the entire morning, conscious of her presence in the periphery of her vision.
They fall into step easily and she finds herself tracing the path to the gardens, where the blooms seem more vivid in the weak sunlight and her favourite bench is still waiting for her. She hasn’t been able to curl up on the stone seat since her second growth spurt years ago now, but there’s still something like peace here even if she can’t hug her knees to her chest the way she wants to.
Vi takes up the remaining space and the heat she radiates seeps through the damp fabric of Caitlyn’s dress uniform and chases the chill across her skin in a shiver she can’t quite suppress.
“Cait, why don’t we just go - ”
“I’m going to find Jinx,” she says, hoping her voice sounds as calm and even as she wants it to be. She’d practiced this in her head, imagined all the possible ways Vi could react, planned her arguments and counter arguments so that in this moment, she could say it without wavering, her breath as slow and steady as the moment right before she pulls a trigger.
“What?”
Vi pulls away, and the warmth leaves with her.
She looks different from this angle, Caitlyn thinks, looking up at the snarl that curls Vi’s mouth.
It’s not that she expects Vi to stop her and it’s not that she could even if she wanted to, despite her superior strength. But she deserves to know, and despite everything, Caitlyn can’t bring herself to walk away without a word. (Without giving her a choice is the thought she doesn’t let herself have, because that way lies bitterness and pain and a host of other things she doesn’t have time for right now.)
“She has to be stopped.”
“With that?” Vi nods at the pistol strapped to her thigh, and for a split second the familiar weight feels more like a burden than a comfort.
“If necessary.” And she thinks it will be. She can’t see a way for this to end differently and this time, she won’t fail. She won’t.
“Why are you telling me this?”
Vi’s voice is rough and cracking, heavy with unfettered emotion that Caitlyn doesn’t know how to navigate; there’s a rawness to the other woman that repels as much as it attracts and it is the strangest kind of equilibrium that makes everything before her seem flat in comparison.
“What do you want me to say? You want me to give you my blessing? Best of luck hunting down my little sister, Cupcake, hope you kill her before she kills you! Is that what you want?”
She’s breathing hard, adrenaline flushing her cheeks and knotting the hard muscles of her arms and she reminds Caitlyn of a bomb waiting to go off - suddenly she sees the resemblance between the siblings in vivid colour and she has to shake the image out of her mind’s eye for it to pass.
“Of course not. Despite what you might think of us, lethal force is the last resort.” The words feel wooden and awkward in her mouth, falling heavily in the space between them.
“Tell that to the dead kids down in Zaun!”
“Tell that to your sister!” she snaps back, unable to swallow the acid that burns her lips anyway.
To her surprise, Vi deflates, looking for all the world like the girl just out of her teens that she is, and lets out a laugh that sounds more like a sigh. “There you are.”
It drains the fight out of her and the fading adrenaline makes her tired. She sags against the wall and lets out a deep breath that feels like she’s been holding for days when Vi slides back down next to her.
“I’m sorry. About your mom.”
She squeezes her eyes shut and they burn and burn. “It’s not your fault.”
Vi hums and she feels the vibration of it more than she hears the sound. “It’s not yours either.”
Something that feels like a sob gets caught in her chest and it takes all her years of experience in being a politician’s daughter to keep it from escaping. “I could have stopped her.”
She’s grateful when Vi doesn’t tell her she’s wrong, when cotton wrapped knuckles brush against her own before thick fingers criss-cross with hers, warm and solid and here.
“I think a lot of things about topsiders,” Vi says quietly, carefully after a while, “but I think a lot more of you.”
The sunlight is too bright all of a sudden, so she presses her forehead into Vi’s shoulder instead. “I can’t let anyone else get hurt.”
You might not have a choice is what goes unsaid, but the tightness of Vi’s hand around hers makes her feel like they might have a fighting chance.
Vi gets to keep the gauntlets. No one demands them back and she sure as hell isn’t offering them up, so as far as she’s concerned, they’re hers now. Flecks of neon paint that cling to the finer details are as good as scratching her name into the metal, though she does that anyway out of boredom.
The conveyor isn’t her idea by any means, but the look Caitlyn shot her when Tobias made the suggestion ensured she kept her opinion to herself. Not that it was needed - she can see the worry in the pinched corners of his mouth and the heavy gaze that tracks his daughter’s every step.
It doesn’t matter much anyway; they bypass the private platform and then the public one before continuing to a door marked pretty clearly for being for authorized persons only. Caitlyn doesn’t even hesitate before pushing it open.
Vi flinches, expecting an alarm or something to go off, which doesn’t go unnoticed, if the smirk Caitlyn shoots her way is anything to judge by. It would be annoying, this little jab from someone who probably hasn’t been denied access to anything in her entire life, if it wasn’t the closest thing to a smile she’d seen from her since - well, since.
“So what’s the plan?”
“We’ll have to gather intelligence,” Caitlyn says, leading the way. “Power abhors a vacuum and no doubt one of the chembarons will be planning to make a move, if they haven’t already.”
She lets her go on, watching Caitlyn talk more to herself than anything else, ideas and hunches spilling out like ale from a burst keg. The words wash over her, soothing in a way that it’s better she doesn’t think too hard on.
They descend to the entresol through maintenance corridors and passages probably used for smuggling, emerging next to a tinkersmith’s.
This time, Caitlyn doesn’t need to be told before hiding her rifle beneath a cloak and pulling the hood up to cast her face in shadow. It’s a strange kind of deja vu, familiar but completely different because this time, the blue eyes that catch hers are brighter than they are sharp, and the still too perfect posture seems rigid with determination instead of arrogance.
Vi pulls her own hood up to cover her hair, though she kind of doubts it’ll do much to hide her from anyone she actually knows.
Caitlyn’s already scanning the street, planning their next move, muttering under her breath.
And then, because Vi can’t help herself, she asks, “What about - ”
Her voice - or maybe her willpower - fails her, but she forces the words out, even though it feels like her throat is closing up. “Jinx. What about Jinx?”
Caitlyn’s attention snaps back to her and Vi feels her mouth go dry.
“Jinx is…an unpredictable variable at this point,” she says slowly, and it’s clear she’s choosing her words carefully and Vi knows it’s for her sake. “But whoever tries to take advantage of the situation will want to have her on side. She’s…valuable.”
Vi doesn’t quite know why, but the heavy feeling on her chest eases up, letting her breathe. The weird thing is how the moment stretches into another and then another as Caitlyn watches her, not pressing or pushing, just watching. And for once, the flame that’s kept her alive all this time doesn’t flare, doesn’t rage into an inferno she can’t control.
She sets her jaw and nods.
“Let’s do this, then.”
The staff move her things to the guest suite she’d claimed when the thought of sleeping in her own room made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. It’s a luxury by any measure but she’s hardly about to take any sass from Vi on the matter when the other woman tosses her gauntlets carelessly in a corner and squirrels away her slowly growing collection of clothes at the bottom of the wardrobe.
Besides. She’s never shared a living space before and she tells herself that perhaps this is like having a flatmate. And if it isn’t quite de rigeur for flatmates to share a bed, she’s hardly an authority on the subject anyway.
They fall into something like a routine, or as much as a routine as one can have when their cities are on the verge of war.
Caitlyn rises first, eager to review her notes from the night before and the strategy for the day ahead. By the time her neglected morning tea is at risk of tepidity, her father will pass through the dining room on his way to the temporary Council chambers as the Kiramman House proxy.
At some point, because day and night are relative when you can hardly see the sun, Cupcake, they’ll return to the Undercity.
She’s never had a partner before, not really. Not since the Academy and fellow cadets didn’t count when they were either eager to be paired with the Kiramman heir or forced there by process of elimination.
This…was different. Vi was different.
She was smarter than Caitlyn suspected anyone had ever really given her credit for, intuitive in a way that would be enviable if not for the impulsiveness that seemed to go hand-in-hand. Confident to the point of near arrogance but somehow wholly indifferent to how she was perceived. She was unpredictable, uncanny in her ability to read the body language that Caitlyn could only puzzle through later, she -
“Cait. Caitlynnnn,” Vi drags out her name while poking a surprisingly dextrous hextech-clad finger into her shoulder. “You that scared?”
They’d arrived at the edge of the upper sump levels while she was dangerously, unprofessionally caught up in her own thoughts and she can feel the flush rising in her cheeks with embarrassing speed. Securing the mask promised to filter out the worst of the grey, if its seller was to be believed, she clears her throat and ignores the way Vi’s smirk only grows in response.
“Not at all,” she lies, because surely at some point this becomes easier and less insane. “After you.”
Vi tosses herself off the rooftop with an abandon that Caitlyn is pretty certain will never stop terrifying her, and then she takes a breath and jumps.