Chapter Text
Vi can’t say it, but she can think it as much as she likes.
Cait, I—
She thinks it a lot.
All of it desperate to spill off her lips, like it’s blood from blocking with her face; that she’ll bite down on and suck in, as the words become the last thing she has to cling to.
Vi has to. This is what she asked for, for Caitlyn to stop the invasion.
And because it’s about what Caitlyn needs now — not her.
Whatever that is, because Vi will figure out how to give it to her. Whatever gets Cait through this, so she can be herself again. Like in the brothel, or under the tree. Or with her on the bed.
Until then Vi doesn’t think Caitlyn can stop.
She’s tried. Asked Caitlyn, to get her out of the manor: where would you find the sweetest cupcakes in all of Piltover? Maybe because she wanted to know how Caitlyn would react to that word, still terrified to remind her of whatever Jinx must’ve done to get it out of her.
Then Cait named a place they never went. Ordered them in while briefing the strike-team — Loris, Steb, Maddie, and Vi — on Margot, then was barely able to enjoy hers because the baker made a patriotic asshole of himself refusing to be paid with Kiramman cogs.
All because of her mom.
He wasn’t. Vi made sure of it, slamming the door in his face after telling Cait she had it handled. Cait wouldn’t herself cry about it, so Vi tried the gardens, with no Key to let them fall into the pipeworks. And then Cait couldn’t, thoughts swirling behind her eyes, as petals plumed on the vent and dried to kindling, the words stuck behind her teeth.
She hasn’t cried in front of Vi since she refused the badge.
Even after Vi took it later, while she was knee-deep in the blood of the Commandos who’d just died wearing one — telling herself she should’ve liked the sight of it, except they’d pull off another broken mask and she’d blink and it’d be Cait instead. Now Vi catches Cait staring at the weight of it on her hip, even after ripping the matched choker off Vi’s throat, and left her with the loose cravat Vi then dyed pink and sewed the opposite side of her uniform like that might balance it out.
Caitlyn only cries on the other side of a locked door.
The nights where they hold the silence together — holding each other, skin and silk under Vi’s hands — come less and less, as Vi finds Cait passed out over the desk more and more. Cait never asking how she woke up in her own bed again — Vi across the hall like the overstayed guest she is.
But if that’s the only time Cait can cry, without her, Vi will give her that chance. Because just maybe it’ll drain this all out, and she’ll get to be the same person she was on the other side of this.
Vi can wear the badge for that.
To prove she won’t leave again, not until her sister or her monster are found.
Not until Caitlyn can take Vi’s heart in return: to which, Vi will give her the know-how she needs on the fissures, and let it choke a little bit at a time. Vi will keep a thumb on the cork and her cheek, and put her fists where Caitlyn’s problems are.
Vi will give her violence.
Vi just wishes she could give Cait—
She blocks the now-familiar stench of flaming Shimmer with her nose; still almost reaches for her mask, before she decides to let it burn in her throat.
Vi needs it off to keep watch, as Caitlyn bares down on an arrested Vyxer with too much metal in her face not to look important. Not on the ganger: Loris has her backed up on his shield, and Maddie’s over Caitlyn’s shoulder thumbing through whatever confiscated papers shouldn’t be fuel for the burn-pile. Not for Vi’s actual guard-dog job.
It’s to keep them on Caitlyn.
Waiting to call over to her, like when the door to the guest room is shut and Vi guiltily says her name, three letters short. Desperate for her to be close and not to hear.
She can count the paces it’ll take to get to her, stuck for now under the brothel’s façade of faux-Margot’s giant, ridiculous head. It stares down at her, last of the Grey still bleeding out of her nostrils — which, as far as Vi cares, she can choke on.
Except the real Margot wasn’t fucking here.
Or, she escaped. Caitlyn seems to think so, as Vi can make out her questions more and more. Vi looks in case Loris is trying to cue her, then behind her at Steb. He’s helping one of the working girls still wheezing on the steps, giving her painkillers and a spare mask before she runs off. Then someone else, that Vi was too distracted to spot, blows past Steb’s shoulder before he can stop her.
She tries to stalk right past Vi into Margot’s.
“H-hey!” Vi calls out. The girl doesn’t look like a ganger but, “Shit. Wait, stop!”
She rounds on Vi, stares at her from a steeper angle than the head. Vastaya. Taller than Caitlyn, even before Vi can look up at her pink-tipped ears; claws screeched to a halt on the stone, the Grey between her toes.
“What?” she demands, ears stooping to the back.
“You can’t go in there, i-it’s not safe,” Vi tries telling her, her gauntlet gesturing at the Grey. It’s everywhere inside, will be till they shut it off.
“Oh. I’m aware,” she says, “I was there when you pumped it in.” Her yellow-honeyed eyes drip over Vi as she narrows them at her, “Quite nostalgic.”
Vi doesn’t remember her from the panicked girls who’d first ran out of the place, down the Rapturewalk, before every other place — all of them Margot’s too, Caitlyn said — started to empty in turn as the smog reached them. Some of them pushed aside as Vyxers tried to figure out what other gang was attacking them. None of them like her.
Wherever it is she went then, Vi needs her to go back. She growls, “And if we hadn’t? Got you out of harm’s way, didn’t it, and you were fine.”
“Those your words?” the stranger matches.
How couldn’t they be? Sure, Caitlyn had fancier ways to write it down in the reports but, “If it helps get rid of Silco’s leftovers. Then yeah, more or less.”
“So I’m supposed to thank you?”
“No, it’s—”
“That I should find myself grateful to starve on cleaner streets,” the stranger spills, like she’d swallowed it in the chaos just to be able to cough it back up on Vi now. “I need what I left in there,” she says. “It’s medical.”
Vi has to stop her, but she’s still counting the number of pointed and black-polished nails sunk into her skin as the stranger makes for the doorway. Steb has rushed up to Vi, and she hears the clink of unslung cuffs. It clicks her back together.
“Deputy?” Steb asks.
Vi can’t do it like this.
She drops her right gauntlet, shakes her head, and waves Steb off toward Caitlyn. She pivots fast, closing up the last steps just in time to grab an arm going for the curtains.
The stranger seizes up.
She doesn’t struggle, but tries to shiver free, and Vi lets her.
“You’re still following me,” she hisses, burying her rescued hand into the lavender coils of cloth wrapped around her shoulders and breast, brooched with unfamiliar brass.
A mottled, bitter face nestles between the coils.
“Yeah, I am,” Vi tells it. “Can’t you go to Babette’s? I know she’ll help.”
It was the safest place in the Lanes for her. Babette had kept it open and out of Silco’s way for years — barring one backstabbing, one-armed regular, who Vi isn’t gonna admit might be why. Certainly Vi had thought that when she’d tried to ditch Caitlyn there, still lucky that it didn’t work.
Without Ekko — if Vi hasn’t lost him — Babette might be the last family Vi has down here, everyone else she knew either dead or as unrecognisable as the streets are. If it wasn’t for Silco, Vi probably would’ve ended up as her bouncer: Keep this up and Babette’ll have you on her front door when you’re old enough, Vander had said, proudly teaching her how to punch in the old arcade before Powder had fixed it all.
And why, exactly, would I spend my time watching after some whores?
Violet! We don’t use that word down here, Vander had scolded, and asked what would’ve happened if Powder had heard her. Now where’d you learn to say it like that?
It was… some Piltie who’d walked by. We didn’t rob him, I swear! Vi still cringes at being such a jackass, wanting to look tough at fourteen. She wouldn’t have minded the job at all; it certainly seemed better to her than the one the girls had.
“Babette can’t help a tenth of the girls at her door right now, let alone any other time,” the stranger says, name rolling off a barbed tongue. “Why d’you think they were here?”
“I don’t know,” Vi admits. “Haven’t been around.”
The brass leaf dangling off the stranger’s headdress tinkles, as she tilts and tries to parse Vi. Enforcers are never from down here. Maybe she’ll realise that Vi isn’t the same.
“Tell me,” Vi says, ramming a cheap cork in her frustration.
“Options, and that there’s none this side of the river,” the stranger humors, running a thumb over each of her fingertips. She points at Margot’s metal chin, “None except her, and the Madame isn’t very fond of people selling on her turf without first letting her take the choiciest cut.”
Vi glances down the abandoned walk — splatters of red-light from frosted, heart-shaped windows. Down here is Margot’s but, “So what, it’s all her turf?”
“Yes, but I can take care of myself.” The stranger tucks a strand of umber hair back under her headscarf. “Not interested in serving myself up as the two-for-one special on anyone else’s menu. Her or Babette or—”
Vi almost thinks it’s a dare: to guess what the other ‘one’ is.
”But… to do that I need my stuff.”
“What is it?” Vi asks, not liking the feel of the cork bubbling. She peers around the corner to check. Steb has lined up with Loris, and Cait is still… busy. “Just— tell me and I can go in for it. They’ve just cleared out anything Shimmer to burn.”
“Shit.”
It drips out of the stranger like factory run-off into the sump — and Vi doesn’t want to have to wade into it. Vi sighs, mouth shut, and amiss ears still swivel towards her.
“It is medication,” she says, probably able to hear Caitlyn too, and trusting Vi less for it. “But there’s a strain of Shimmer it needs to work. It’s not one of Silco’s, and it isn’t my recipe. I just… copy it and make modifications. For a client, not me. And my—”
“It’s probably already in the pit,” Vi tries to tell her, her own hesitant disbelief cutting back into her from the mirror of Margot’s shoulder.
It’s too vague and too specific. Vi could make a safer bet if she just believes it’s another high to fuck to, tailored to an asshole who can make do without it. Vi hopes the stranger can too, because she’s not gonna let her round the corner to Caitlyn either.
Neither of them needs that.
“I have to check.”
“No,” Vi says, left-and-last gauntlet raised.
“I was in a—”
“You don’t.”
The stranger rolls her head, curling the wine-dark tip of her nose; her fists tightened into bunches. She looms over the distance she’s put between them, and then snaps it shut, forces herself into the palm of Vi’s gauntlet, “You blow up half my livelihood, and now you’re trying to do it to the other half too?”
Vi bounces her back, or the stranger lets herself be.
Because she’s calling a bluff Vi isn’t sure she’s made; making it clear how much power Vi has over her, that it’s too much to use and that Vi won’t if she’s not a real Enforcer.
That’s what she’s doing, Vi knows she is, but—
The stranger pushes back in, till Vi can make out every dark speckle of her fur, and sneers, “Even when topsiders say they’re looking out for us they’re all still taking.”
Vi can’t hold it.
“I’m not a topper! I’m—”
The cork blows, and her gauntlet blasts steam in both their faces. Vi shuts her eyes at the sting, and hears the stranger squeal. She opens to see her flinched back, pressing herself to the cold, metal shoulder of the façade; hand shaking around a knife borne on her dress.
The slits of her eyes are wide at Vi, dew and tears on her fur.
Vi didn’t— She didn’t mean to. She didn’t.
It’s the exhaust; on the Atlases. Because it sits under her thumb, and she presses it when she doesn’t mean to; because it’s too fucking easy to; because she didn’t—
Vi is the one who has to stop. The mirror-metal exposing how her chest is heaving like a busted pipe; smog bursting out the seams, her uniform buttons about to pop off like the sheared bolts from the internal pressure.
”Fuck,” she retches out. “I-I'm sorry. Okay. I’m—”
She dumps the gauntlet next to the other, and shoves her hands deep into her pockets where they can’t hurt anyone. The stranger doesn’t run. It’s a shock she hasn’t. Vi hopes that Caitlyn didn’t hear, can’t bear to check around the corner. She doesn’t need this.
Vi can handle it. Tries to be close without leaving the stranger in a corner, needs her to leave the knife alone.
“I’m from here, in the Lanes. Right here,” she says — elbows out wide, head low.
The stranger slowly peels herself out of the nook of Margot’s bronze-leafed collarbone. She gives up the knife to squeeze an arm across her chest.
Her eyes never leave Vi.
“Oh, I can hear where you’re from,” the stranger says, warily, like there’s something in Vi she didn’t care to notice before. “But you’re not from here anymore, are you—”
Is it the badge—?
“Violet.”
Vi swallows.
Shoves the panic down her throat before she chokes on it.
Has to.
No-one should know that — except the dead and who might soon be, whether Vi wants them to be or not. Maybe Caitlyn does, but she’s never said, and Vi tries not to wonder what it would sound like on her lips.
It was on purpose. Vi’s sure of it. The stranger wants to put her on two right feet and how can she blame her, when all the stranger has otherwise is a knife Vi could break the wrist she’d hold it in. It’s blood she has to bite down on, but how does Vi suck it out when it’s mixed with a poison she expects to find on the stranger’s face.
But Vi doesn’t find it.
Instead, it’s like she’s looking at Vi for the first time. Maybe in a long time, her face soft and wet. Vi knows some of it must be tears when she rubs her face. Vi tries to—
Click-clack-Click-clack-Click-clack.
Vi turns out her pockets, grabs her lapels to hold herself together, and turns. She hesitates to round the corner, but a voice from behind tells her, “It’s the shortstack.”
“Deputy!” chirps Maddie, an aching moment later. “Commander Kiramman was worried, she wanted me to check on you. Officer Steb said you were with—”
It might just be the worst fucking word Vi has ever heard.
Commander.
A rank as standard as whatever kind of ‘Deputy’ Vi is supposed to be, which she wants to stop hearing as much as she sees ‘Emergency Powers’ invoked in Cait’s reports. Maddie is always too eager to say it, especially when she gets to put a ‘Kiramman’ on the end of it too.
“It’s fine… Maddie,” Vi says, needing to trust the future Caitlyn sees in her. “Tell her I’m helping someone, okay? Someone lost. How’s the… interrogation?”
Maddie isn’t hard to distract.
“No word on how the Baron escaped,” she reports, straightened up in an instant. “The Vyxer we caught’s still weesht about it, but the Commander can make her talk, I’m sure!”
It’s further to come back to herself if Cait can.
“Maddie?” Vi says.
“Yes, Deputy?”
“I’ll be around soon.”
“Of course, Deputy!” Maddie beams, and leaves Vi to the stranger who’s not as easy to get rid of. Her ears flutter as Vi’s lungs hiss in relief, and Vi stares.
Violet.
She tries to remember her in return.
“Whatever name you’re looking for, it isn’t mine anymore,” the stranger who knows her supplies. “A lot’s changed.”
“Yeah,” Vi says, with less fight in her about that than she wants. “It has.”
It can’t be Stillwater, not if she knows that.
“I knew Vander, alright,” the stranger clarifies, though Vi can’t tell how many years are under her fur. She shrugs under their weight, “And for what it’s worth, kid, I miss him.”
Vi puts her eyes down the walk again; realises the stranger is too when she looks back. She can’t see the Last Drop from here, Vi can still always feel where it is, like a compass. She follows its point, buried in her chest, “How… how did you know my dad?”
The stranger furrows her brow, weighs whether to talk on them like scales.
“I was new in town,” she says. “Still trying on the headscarf for the first time. Wanted to settle for once while I did it,” her nail twirls a lemniscate over the brass copy cresting her head, a nomad’s sign, that’s meant to mean she never would.
Vi knows the sign from Stillwater tattoos; can remember it on the buckles of traveller’s belts, the ones too wary to pickpocket. Always on men, like there was a code to it. The women didn’t wear scarves often, but they were also the only ones who did.
Being a nomad isn’t the ‘other’ she dared Vi about, Vi realises.
It’s why the stranger isn’t one anymore.
She was ‘supposed’ to wear it on her belt.
“Had to learn how to sell my own intimacy while putting on something meant to let me reserve it; figure out if I even agreed with that. Hard to do, especially when it was still so… delicate.” The stranger rubs an empty palm; a last, persistent shiver in it.
“So Vander was—”
“His place used to be the safest in Zaun for me, when I needed to vet a client. He made sure of it. Now that’s up to Margot and her lieutenants, if I get to at all. Still better than where I came from.” Vi knows the tell in the stranger’s palm. Dad once told her about the people who drank too much, said it was because it was the only thing left that made them feel happy. “He let me sleep in a booth sometimes, when I really needed it. Made sure I got home safe the other times. It let me save up to start practising again; just for the little things, like what the miners dealt with, or because of a fight he couldn’t break up in time.”
Vi remembers Sevika starting most of those, when from hiding behind an upturned table she had an awe about it she isn’t fond of now.
“I liked the balance, sometimes I even got to take a break. Made me think things could be even better,” the stranger continues, letting some of the distance slip, eyes on the weight on Vi’s hip. “It’s a strange legacy he’s left behind.”
“Yeah, well. If he was here he’d understand,” Vi promises, herself more than the stranger.
There was one good Enforcer, right?
Grayson, the Sheriff who at least warned him before the boots stomped in. Who Caitlyn missed too. “He wanted to do the right thing, he just… couldn’t do it on his own.”
Vander would trust her to do this. Mylo and Clag might’ve given her shit, but he’d make them listen. Vi doesn’t know how she’ll explain it to Ekko.
She hopes he’s busy and not avoiding her, because it’s not like she can go chasing him down the Lanes like she used to. Firelights are still in the reports, Enforcers told to stick clear. Vi sees him in splotches of white everywhere; keeps wishing it was his mask, slipping down a rooftop and off a face that’s worried but will still smile at her.
“Right thing. Wrong reason,” the stranger says, watching the corner for more Enforcers. “All this for her dead mom?”
Vi blinks.
“There’s more to it than that,” her voice cracks, like a scuttle-crab caught underfoot.
“And she tells you about it?”
Vi can’t give her an answer, until that becomes it.
The stranger winces, tucks a knuckle under nose to hide it, “Forgive me? Think I just lost my appetite for it the first time we crossed that bridge, or tried to. It’s… I don’t forget it, every time I have to walk over it now. It’ll be sixteen years soon, a half of my life.”
She was there. Whoever she was, back then. But then why would Vi have cared? Even after she moved into the Last Drop, there was no reason for a dumb teenager to care about any of Vander’s regulars, except maybe the ones who started fights.
There was bigger things to worry about: Mylo and Claggor; littler things if it was Powder.
Vi can feel candle-heat on her boots, “Vander used to tell me I wouldn’t find anything good over that bridge.” She needs him to be wrong.
The stranger smirks, a tail curled around her leg, “Hmm, nothing good on this side either. I tried to leave… six, seven years ago, after he died. Everyone knew Silco had killed him. Got pissed Babette wouldn’t stand up in his place, and didn’t get her till I was gone.”
A few tried, Babette had told Vi, but Silco’s got the muscle… and the money.
The stranger repeats the gesture, running over the crest before suddenly cutting it in half, “But then that wanderlust I’m supposed to have just brought me in a fucking circle, like I’d never even tried to run. Besides, everywhere else was worse or Noxus, with their laws.”
“Laws about—?” Vi remembers. “Oh.”
Order requires a standard some people are made to fall out of, and lineages require heirs who can make more of them, so it all trickles down like a broken bottle of poison.
“And the Chem-Barons were better?” Vi sincerely asks. For all his promises, only thing it seems Silco did to Piltover after killing the last Sheriff was to pay off the next one.
“They’re the topsiders of bottom. But at least I could pick something from Silco’s wasteland,” the stranger offers. “Plenty of hurt people to help, entertain. I—”
She balks suddenly; grabs her tail to soothe it, like it’s just been stepped on.
“Tell me?” Vi pushes softly, knowing the eyes on her badge; not knowing, but she wants to, about a life that ran so close to hers.
It feels as if, for a moment, she’s still living it herself.
When the stranger’s words come, they come with the practise of having been thought a thousand times, whether she wanted them to be or not: “Client goes to a doctor topside and hurts him; doctor goes to the Enforcers. He goes to a Fissure whore?”
There’s a shoulder put between Vi and the stranger.
“She’ll keep her mouth shut. And even if she somehow doesn’t, no one will believe her. And even if someone does… she’s the one the Badges will come after.”
Vander would’ve put himself in the way for her.
We don’t offer up our own people.
But the stranger is already walking past her again.
“Wait!” Vi begs.
“Look. I have meds in there too, ones that are mine,” the stranger does in return. “Which aren’t Shimmer and that I need.”
“Can you give me a minute?” Vi asks. She can’t hear Caitlyn, which should be a good sign. “I can speak to—”
The stranger squeezes a fold of the crimson curtains, “Haven’t you done enough?”
She takes a deep breath.
“You can’t walk in there yourself. You’ll—”
“You’ll arrest me?” she interrupts.
“No…”
“Then escort me.”