Chapter Text
A strand of blue flashed against the green of the lanes, and Caitlyn Kirramann knew that it belonged to something or someone bright and quick and dangerous.
Caitlyn also knew that she hadn’t run away from home to twiddle her fingers, so she did the only sensible thing to do: chase after it.
As she ran, Caitlyn was reminded how, despite her mother praising her for being such a “bright spirited girl”, one thing her mother had always found fault in were her daughter’s decision making skills since, at the age of fourteen, it seemed that she had none. No matter how simple the question, Caitlyn never had a sure answer. But her indecisiveness wasn’t her fault. On the contrary, since she was born, every decision had been made for her. Her hair? Straight violet strands, never dyed, barely brushing the tops of her shoulders. Her nickname? Cait, much better than Lyn, especially since her mother had once met a Lyn who “had the most obstinately large nose”. And although her parents held out hope that making the correct decisions was a learnable skill— one that would grow over the course of her puberty—Caitlyn tended to hold the body of her guns tighter than any hope that required her parents to actually let her live a life.
The strand of blue was still running—-faster than anything Caitlyn had needed to chase in her life, but if she were to disregard the neighbor’s cats lurking around her mother’s violets, there wasn’t much of a comparison. After the third time her heels caught against the uneven tiles of Zaun’s cobble streets, she desperately regretted wearing her typical “Kirramann daughter” outfit— a knee length long dress, with long socks and sensible heels. Running further into Zaun, chest heaving and toes aching, they weren’t so sensible after all.
The blue streak took a sharp turn around a sharper corner, and Caitlyn was fully prepared to follow before she realized that around the sharp corner was simply air. She stuttered to a stop, heels slipping on the edge of a street that led to nothing. She looked around, used to asking for help, used to help waiting to be asked. There was nothing around her but dark green. It was only then, when the blue streak was no longer in her line of sight, leading her to a destination, unknown, but a destination still, that she realized how dim the street around her truly was. And how many people were tucked within its dark.
Startled, Caitlyn spun quickly on her heels, ready to briskly walk back towards the safety of Piltover, adventure be damned. As she walked, she couldn’t help but notice how loud her heels rang against the street and how silent the shadows were that followed her. She clasped her gun tighter, dark eyebrows furrowed. It went like this: her heels clacking faster, their shadows following quicker. It didn’t take long before Caitlyn was jogging, then running, then sprinting back to the safety of the light.
But shadows aren’t slow.
Just before her toe could cross the line into Piltover territory, the shadows surrounded her, revealing themselves to be less of a figment and more of a problem.
Zaunites.
“Now what’s a Piltie princess like you doing down in the dungeon with us?”
Caitlyn shuddered as a man stepped closer to her, his white skin waned from years of what looked like no sun and little food. His gray eyes narrowed at her, skimming the entirety of her body.
She gripped her gun tighter still, stuttering out a meager, “I’m not looking for trouble.”
The man approached with a laugh, making a grab for her hair before instinct kicked in. Caitlyn gathered her gun, lifting it into position, before defensively pointing the nozzle towards the man’s skull.
The man blinked once before laughter filled the circle. “Not looking for trouble, she says! She forgot to mention that she was the trouble.” He sniffed, eyeing the barrel of her gun with derision. “Now how do we feel about that, boys?”
Another of the men sniffed, revealing a big bat behind an even bigger back. “I don’t know, boss,” he spun the bat clockwise before letting it tap gently against the outside of his thigh, “but I think I might be in the mood for a little trouble.”
Caityln jerked her gun from the first man, spinning her hips in a circle to face the new challenger. She spun in a defensive circle, wondering how the hell she would shoot them all if they made a grab for her together. By her estimates, it was a terrible five men against one teenage girl. She didn’t have to be a whiz in math to understand that she was fundamentally screwed.
As the circle tightened around her, Caitlyn turned her hips towards the biggest man— the one they called boss. If she couldn’t beat all of them, she could at least kill the worst of them.
She’d never killed a man before, but a bullet never hesitated.
Just then, as her finger scratched the trigger, a spark of blue exploded in front of her face. Momentarily blinded, Caitlyn reached up towards her eyes in confusion, wiping some sort of wet substance off the corner of her eye. She blinked in surprise as her finger came away blue, like there it was some sort of…
“Paint?” She said aloud, her head on a swivel. In the few seconds her vision had been obscured, three men had fallen on the ground, the red of their blood mixing with the blue paint splattered across their limbs. The man with the bat shifted from his spot on the street, moaning with effort as he crawled towards Caitlyn, a blood-thirsty expression evident under the blue paint coating his eyelids.
“Oh, no you don’t.” a girl smaller than Caitlyn emerged from the smoke, a smaller, less sophisticated gun held loosely in her left hand. From the lack of blood on her skin and the terrifying expression on her face, Caitlyn surmised that the blue paint came from her. The little girl squatted before the big man, holding her weapon to the corner of his head. He swung his arm towards her, clearly aiming to break her legs before the smug expression slid off his face as the little girl hopped backwards from her squatting position with a small “Oops. Didn’t mean to give you false hope. My sister says it’s basic manners to give someone your name before beating the shit out of them. Wanna guess mine?”
“Shut up.”
“No, silly,” The little girl replied, aiming her gun at his forehead with a smile, “It’s Pow.” She pulled the trigger, and the air exploded blue.
It all happened in mere minutes. One moment, Caitlyn was contemplating the best way to die, and the next, she was saved by a tiny blue-haired menace.
Well, almost saved. Behind the little girl, Caitlyn could see one last man standing— the one they called boss. He came running towards them with a ballistic cry, each step shaking the shack’like buildings surrounding them. Caitlyn quickly shifted her gun, aiming between the man’s crazed eyes, but before she could pull the trigger, the little girl—Pow— unleashed another weapon. This one glowed purple against the green of Zaun, and Caitlyn’s eyes widened in recognition.
This weapon didn’t belong in Zaun. It didn’t even truly belong in Piltover.
She moved before she could think, tackling Pow down to the ground and ripping the glowing weapon from her stubby hands. “Absolutely not!” With a yell, she threw it across the street, before covering Pow with her string-like body. Her last thought before the explosion was “We’re both going to die because I am built like a limp noodle”
A stream of color and sound rattled against Caitlyn’s skull, and she squeezed her eyes tightly, wishing desperately for death to be quicker than the pain of magical fire.
Moments later, after the array of colors lighting the air had reduced back into a dull green and her ears held only the echo of a thunderclap, Caitlyn tentatively rolled off of Pow, blinking erratically. She made a move to get up only to realize there were two problems with that: her knee was bleeding profusely and her heels, her poor unappreciated heels, were broken. Beside her, Pow stayed glued to the ground, glaring at Caitlyn from underneath her blue bangs. Her stare startled Caitlyn into stuttering, “Why are you looking at me like that? You almost got us killed!”
Pow rolled her eyes. “I saved your nonexistent ass. It’s not my fault you threw the bomb the wrong way.”
Caityn narrowed her eyes. “I didn’t ask for your help.”
Pow replied with a cross of her noodle arms, “And I didn’t ask to be followed. Tell me, how does it feel?”
But before Caitlyn could continue arguing with the pubescent, there was a thump and a drag of feet as Boss Man came limping from the shadows.
Caitlyn gasped, grasping at the ground for her gun only to realize it had flown out of her hands earlier and was now resting on the ground in what seemed like oceans away from her. Out of the corner of her eye, Caitlyn saw Pow pull something from the inside of her jacket. Something that glowed purple. “You have two?” Caitlyn yelled in disbelief as she threw her body over the smaller girl’s. She wrestled Pow to the ground, ignoring the way her knee burned in protest.
Pow struggled against Caitlyn, but the universe had finally done her a solid: there was probably only one person on planet earth that Caitlyn could over power in a physical brawl and that person was under her right now.
“Do you have a death wish?” Pow growled, attempting to snatch her weapon back from Caitlyn’s hands.
“I should be asking you that!” Caitlyn spit out as she felt Pow’s palm slap against her face, “Magic is unpredictable! If you try throwing this at him, you risk blowing us to bits in the process!”
“Who asked you!”
“You should’ve!”
Caitlyn was about to block another one of Pow’s amateur slaps when the girl suddenly stopped. “Wait. Something’s not right.”
Caitlyn furrowed her brows, risking loosening her grip in order to check out her surroundings. The little girl was right— something wasn’t right. It was quiet, too quiet. Boss Man was nowhere to be seen and where he last stood, there was no man at all.
Instead, encased in shadow, was a girl. This one seemed about Caitlyn’s age, though the expression in her eyes seemed years older.
It was one of rage. And as Caitlyn followed her eyes towards the subject of her rage, she realized that the subject was, in fact, her. Caitlyn Kirramann. And since the only person on planet earth who Caitlyn could beat in a physical fight was already under her, Caitlyn did the only sensible thing left to do:
She ran. And the girl with the pink hair? She chased.