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It’s quiet tonight.
That fact alone still unsettles Vi. Growing up in Zaun never implied silence. Nights there were ruled by noises of every kind: slot machines rattling without pause, shouted bets and their consequent beatings, music blasting from one pub to the next, mixing into a single beat; groups staggering through the streets, drunk or high or both. All of them were encompassed in a single, constant roar. It might not have been gentle, or the optimal choice for some, but it was what Vi had grown up in, what had imprinted itself as home.
And so silence, when it came, was never peaceful. It arrived after the echo of retreating footsteps from a cell guard, leaving one alone with a broken mind, bleeding on the floor, cold and hopelessness seeping into the bones.
Piltover has dressed for the occasion, yet seems to recoil inwards, as if hiding its still-lukewarm tragedy behind decorations, covering the wounds with chromatic bandages and awkward conviviality.
Caitlyn had mentioned it almost apologetically, much to Vi’s surprise. No, it was usually brighter than this. More lights, more excess. After the war, after the losses, economic and otherwise, there were certain limits not even the highest classes dared to cross, so this year this is what one gets: festivity rationed and cheer restrained. No one felt like celebrating, and carving the thin line between respect and positivity was a craft that required attentive, elegant care.
Vi feels foolish for sulking over it. Everyone lost something that day. She knows that. She isn’t special in her grief, nor does she have more right to it. So, to pass the time and fill the crushing silence that lurks in every corner of the monumental mansion, she finds herself drifting through Caitlyn’s Snowdown planning like a ghost; trying to help, trying to care, and failing at both. She has no eye for this kind of thing, lacks the knowledge and instinct for it, and that only folds her further into a devastating sense of uselessness and a consuming loneliness.
Snowdown in the Lanes had never looked like this— grandiose, diluted across every part of the city in a common, shared celebration. It had always been a niche thing, something kept private.
She remembers waking to the smell of her mother’s cooking: crêpes warming over the fire, cocoa dusted on top, pure and dark, an extremely rare and therefore expensive ingredient, precious, exceptional in its seasonal availability. The first bite was always the best.
A bright, dreamy excitement used to settle over their home during those weeks. Something soft and buzzing that made the days stretch longer. Vi was lucky enough to live it twice: once in her own skin, and then vicariously through Powder, whose wonder made the season feel fuller than it ever had before, a new and immeasurable happiness unlocking as it came alive in her sister’s wide eyes.
Her father would cobble together little trinkets from whatever he and Vi could find—stray wires, broken casings, bits of coloured lights scavenged from the street or pulled from the trash. Nothing matched; some didn’t work. But by Snowdown morning, they became eagerly anticipated treasures: a heart-shaped length of wire for her mother, and some invented toy for Powder, full of colourful stimulus, glowing unevenly, held together by devoted effort rather than skill.
Vi received her metal gauntlets in what would be their last Snowdown together.
The festive season returned every year, but the perennial sentiment of infantile joy did not, its magic long since slipping through Vi’s premature maturity, until there was nothing left to hold onto but the resigned acceptance that it would remain a memory rather than a reproducible occurrence.
It became less about celebration and more about helping Vander in the bar through chaotic nights, cleaning up after drunk patrons. Still, Vi made the effort for Powder. She tried to preserve that magic for her, to reclaim that buoyant sense of anticipation and stretch it for as long as possible.
And then Stillwater happened, and time stopped making sense.
So it did not truly shock Vi that this year’s Snowdown would not feel like it. What did surprise her—belatedly, and with a sharp sting of self-reproach, because shit, Vi, how could you not see it, was that in a season devoted to family, the Kirammans had yet to learn how to exist as two instead of three.
A poisoned part of her, one she is not proud of, once envied the Kirammans with an ugly, viridian bitterness. She never had the chance to look upon her mother’s dead face, stilled into something beautiful, something peaceful. The last image she carries is scorched into her mind as if by molten metal: her mother lifeless, her eyes empty, her features twisted and obscured beneath ash, reduced to collateral in a failed system.
That was until one night, sometime after midnight, when she found Caitlyn hunched over her desk, sobbing through the orchestration of Snowdown’s meticulous security briefings— crowd control routes, guest lists, patrol rotations, the annual Kiramman-hosted party.
“I have to pick the colour of the table linens,” Caitlyn sobbed into Vi’s chest. “My mother is dead, and I have to care about table linens.”
For gold dulls. Iron oxidises. The privileged and the hungry are fed to the same earthworms, and a dead parent is still a dead parent.
The next morning, Caitlyn woke before anyone else in the house, preparing herself to step back into a world of gilded parasites ready to live off her grief; watching, circling for the collapse in her posture if only for a topic, something to murmur over crystal glasses in light voices and performative looks of sympathy. It would be handled delicately, politely, passed from mouth to mouth as entertainment; and should that need go unmet, then, would you look at that, how easily she had stepped into her mother’s shoes. One might even wonder whether inheritance had softened the blow.
Vi wanted to tear into them. Experienced a rage that for once couldn’t externalise, had nowhere to go, and the frustration of it boiled her alive. Had she been in Caitlyn’s place, she would have screamed at every single person right there at the feet of her mother’s casket.
The first and only time it did spill was during the Sheriff’s investiture, a ceremony that unfolded with all of Piltover’s customary polish.
“…and it is our collective hope,” the speaker announced, “that the newly acclaimed Sheriff, through the example of her courage and integrity, will guide the moral compass of this city’s justice in her own image and likeness.”
“Piltover, shaped in her image?” scoffed a man in front of Vi. “So they want it mutilated as well.”
Attacked, defamed, caught between Piltover’s instrumental presumption and Zaun’s reflexive distrust, Caitlyn belonged fully to neither place, accepted by neither, and it saddened Vi that, amid their mismatched understandings, their lack of rhythm, and the ongoing effort to make sense of themselves and one another within this undefined relationship, the common ground they seemed to find lay in a shared sense of inadequacy.
They did not see the sleepless nights. The way Caitlyn threw herself into her work like a sentence passed down, head lowered, guilt in every step. They did not see how she accepted public cruelty as though it were owed. And if anyone had the right to speak of unjust punishment, it was Vi.
So, with good reason on her side and a righteous sense of entitlement, Vi punched him after the speech.
The worst of it was not the brief chaos it provoked, but Caitlyn’s numbed indifference to the insult and her disapproval of Vi’s actions. And perhaps, in the fight it sparked between them, Vi had been harsher than she meant to be, because Caitlyn had lost an eye but she had been willing to sacrifice more, and that remains something Vi has not yet forgiven her for: the readiness to abandon her, to leave Vi more alone than she has ever been.
Watching the Kiramman matriarch step with a bloodshot eye into a duty that demanded prompt address and efficient execution has, these days, stirred in Vi a persistent reflection on roles that outlast the people who once upheld them, on pillars passing the weight of structure to the next in line, of perpetual substitutions that preserve tradition through endless cycles.
She concludes that it’s fucking ridiculous. Still, the thought and the tiredness of inaction drive Vi into the kitchen, where she steals the cook’s place under his surprised stare and makes crêpes dusted with dark cocoa.
It does not taste the same, missing the touch only a mother seems to own. Jinx, wherever she might be, won’t give her approval, but it belongs to Vi nonetheless, and she shares it with everyone in the house.
“Where are you?”
Vi blinks, returning to the dark bedroom, and turns toward Caitlyn in the doorway. The party has long since ended. Vi has already changed into sweatpants and a tank top. Caitlyn remains half in her finery: the green jacket discarded, her white dress shirt rolled to the elbows, collar opened and a couple of buttons undone, exposing a mole beneath, the bow tie unmade at her throat. The high bun allows those regal high cheeks to flourish and exalt a sapphire eye shining like a jewel, as if the beams of the moonlight were cast exclusively for it to preen.
Vi lowers her gaze to the whisky glass in her hand and feels instantly dejected. She has noticed, how could she not, the intensity of that lone blue eye resting on her across the room when Caitlyn thought her distracted. Not pointedly. Not accusing. Just seeing, cutting through Vi more deeply than anyone ever cared to. She wonders if Caitlyn is aware of the power it holds, even bereft of its twin, how the concern concentrated there makes Vi feel like a disappointment for slipping into habits too familiar to be called old, before she blinks the thought away.
Caitlyn fidgets, hesitating, weighing whether to come closer. Vi wishes she would stop being so trepidatious around her, as though Vi might vanish the moment she looks away. She hates how much she herself keeps making things difficult for them.
When Vi offers a small smile, Caitlyn closes the distance and settles beside her, one hand at Vi’s back to steady herself as she sits.
Where are you, was the question? Stuck in the past, as always.
“Just remembering,” Vi says, interweaving their fingers, squeezing softly, the familiar chill of Caitlyn’s hands seeping into her skin.
“Breathe. Party’s over now,” she murmurs, leaning her head against Caitlyn’s shoulder.
Caitlyn hums in response and leans in, following Vi’s attention toward the window. The city lies calm and quiet at this hour. They sit in silence for a while— not tense, but not entirely at ease either.
Then something small and white drifts down from the sky.
At first, Vi thinks it’s rain, until Caitlyn lifts a hand and points. “Oh. It’s snowing.”
It never snowed in Zaun. The industrial heat melted it before it could ever reach the ground. Vi had only seen it once, years ago, when she and her siblings had snuck topside.
“Hey.” Vi tightens her grip on Caitlyn’s hand and rises abruptly, struck by a sudden whim. “Come with me.”
They don’t have to hide, there is no need to sneak out of the window into the private gardens, but Vi insists, and loves Caitlyn all the more for indulging her, even if it takes a bit of persuasion.
It’s a small patch hidden among a circle of violet trees a little farther off, near the ornamental fountain. The night brushes the space in dark blue, free of artificial light or decoration. Vi extends her hands, gathers enough snow between her palms, and throws it at Caitlyn. The snowball arcs bravely through the air, only to die against her shoulder with all the menace of a breath.
Caitlyn lifts an imperious brow, looks at the point of impact, then back at her. But her breaths grow deeper, the rigidity in her shoulders eases, and a smirk slowly finds its way to her mouth.
Perhaps, this could be Vi’s role, too.
Vi mirrors the smirk smugly, extending her arms to gather more snow under Caitlyn’s narrowing eye.
There isn’t enough snow on the ground for a quick succession of ammunition, for a proper war between them, but the absurdity of waiting with their palms extended, giddy with suspense over who might throw first, makes them giggle.
For all her combat skills, Vi should have known better than to engage in a ranged duel with a sniper. But if she’s good at one thing, it’s improvisation. She pivots in close just as Caitlyn is moulding a new snowball. Caitlyn manages to stamp it into Vi’s face as she barrels straight into her, with the abandon of someone who has already lost the past two rounds and decided one more shock of cold won’t make a difference. Vi wraps her arms around Caitlyn’s waist and tackles them both to the ground, lying on top of her.
Caitlyn’s squeal and her deep laugh as Vi starts to tickle her reverberate through the bluish garden, under the cloudly night sky.
Vi hasn’t had many pretty things in life, but she believes her word still counts when she thinks she’s never seen anything more beautiful than Caitlyn.
It’s strange, almost dissociative, how known and yet unfamiliar Caitlyn feels to her. Perhaps a by-product of the convoluted way they met, sharing their worst experiences and sharpest edges before favourite colours or first dates.
It is unusual.
Vi isn’t interested in normal.
They stare at each other for a breathless moment, neither willing to end the game. Vi pretends to hold her down, but not nearly enough to actually restrain her.
“Got you.”
“Impressive,” Caitlyn says flatly. “You’ve captured the Sheriff of Piltover. What course of action do you intend to pursue?”
Vi shakes her head, smiling so wide that a flash of white canine shows.
Caitlyn lets out a scandalised gasp and swats a hand at Vi’s shoulder as a pinch of snow slips down the back of her collar from her blind spot, drawing a roar of laughter from Vi’s chest.
“Oh, nice. Truly admirable conduct,” Caitlyn says, slumping back with uncharacteristic theatrics. “Taking advantage of a disabled woman in this manner.”
Vi snorts. There’s nothing disabled about this woman. She shrugs, cheeky. “Fair play doesn’t win you much.” She shifts to cup Caitlyn’s cheeks, her thumb brushing away the small shiver she feels. “Is there a bounty on the Sheriff’s head?”
Caitlyn sighs, focusing on Vi’s eyes one at a time, analytical to a fault, always dissecting her into pieces to study. “Winner’s pick.”
Cute, how she’s always giving Vi options.
Vi leans down and kisses her.
Eventually, they’ll have to do the sensible thing, return to the mansion, leave the snow behind, peel off damp clothes and dry themselves off.
But for now, her clothes are soaked, the cold bites deep, and there’s a childlike thrill in the moment; with Caitlyn’s arms around her back, snow melting where her icy lips meet Vi’s, and her muffled laugh filling the silence of this quiet night, this festivity might begin to feel like one.