Chapter Text
VI.
She hasn't been here in years.
They'd visited once. Not really a state visit, just for fun. Not that there are state visits since they've never quite been important enough for that, which is a good thing. A really good thing. In any case, they'd gone to visit Mel that one time and since they were already away from home, since they had time, since nothing had been collapsing, since nothing would break without them being there, they'd taken a slight detour on the way back.
She'd been getting some air on the outer deck of the airship when the detour had been suggested. Had a shawl wrapped around her shoulder—not something she'd been used to before, but it'd been one of many things that had grown on her—and oh so many things, so, so, so many things have grown on her.
Her boots tap on the stones. The sun shines off of the polished surfaces right into her eyes. It kind of hurts.
Good.
She hasn't been alone in years.
She wanders the market with her cloak pulled tight about her. She isn't trying to hide anything; she doesn't have anything to hide, but the brush of the soft wool is reassuring even if it has long lost the scent that she yearns for in her dreams.
She tries not to think about that.
She looks at the stalls with the shiny trinkets and does her very best to not think about how they'd have stopped at stalls like this one, how she'd be the one to take a closer look, how she'd turn back and meet a soft smile, a tilt of the head. How she'd grin and say things like “Steb would never wear this” or “Ekko would probably find a way to turn this into a hoverboard” and they'd walk away with it.
She walks past the food stalls with a different blend of spices, with a different whiff of oil, with the dough in different shapes and less complex twists. Powdered sugar and cinnamon instead of coconut and that delectable sticky sugar-not-sugar that she's never figured out the name of. She could ask but she doesn't want to. She really doesn't want to.
She doesn't want to be here alone but she is.
She climbs the stairs.
There are so many stairs here. In her youth, she'd be all over the rooftops. In her current age, she'd probably manage a leap or two, much to the chagrin of the folks who tried to tell her she could stay with them, that'd they'd work it out somehow, that it's all alright. In any case she doesn't want to break any more bones. Those don't heal quite so quickly anymore. Well, she's not in a rush. There's no one to hurry back to.
But sitting for weeks, hobbling around on crutches, wincing when she puts weight on an ankle? Yeah, nah. That's not really her speed.
She's never really been all that good at sitting still and she'll bet her bottom cog that she's even worse at it right now. She cannot imagine a worse torture than having to sit—fine, she can imagine worse tortures. There are always worse tortures and her brain is pretty good at what it does.
So no, she's not going to break anything. She's going to climb these stairs the good old fashioned way.
Happy?
She thinks she hears a chuckle on the wind, thinks she hears footsteps following up the stone behind her, knows that her heart is more powerful than her mind.
The sun has mostly set.
In the distance she can see the tips of the blue mountains tinted the faintest pink. There's snow on them, she supposes. Snow that doesn't melt all year, snow that doesn't ever disappear, stacks and stacks into drifts that cave and crash down in an avalanche all of a sudden.
She can't breathe.
The wind whips the loose strands of her hair that have escaped the bun that she's put it up in. She'd had braids before, way back when. A bun's easy. A bun's simple and effective and she knows she looks damn good in it.
She sucks a lungful of cold fresh air in, lets it seep into her chest and sink into her bones. It doesn't really help with the breathing but it helps. Helps her not to think about the tinkling laugh, about the fingers that would reach over and brush the stray hairs back, press a soft kiss to her cheek when no one else was looking, when everyone else could see.
She can't breathe.
She doesn't really know what to do with herself.
She is still a person. She has always been a person—besides those years when she hadn't been able to be a person, baked in a crucible over and over again, recast, reforged, reworked. She hadn't been much of a person then but she'd carved her own name into her face and made herself remember. They'd worked on that, too. One of the many, many things they'd worked on together, long nights in the moonlight, easy evenings in the garden, difficult mornings under the trees taking the pieces and putting them back together. The pieces never fit quite right but together they made them work again, filed the sharp edges down, glued them together with a lapis lazuli gold.
Everyone she has met has left footprints on her sands but these shores were built hand by painstaking hand and now two of those strongest hands are gone. She is still her own person but for so long she'd been more than just one soul that there's a void now that sits inside her where there had once been love. She's tried to put things into it, she has, but they don't stay. They don't. The laughter of children, the smiles of those in need, the touches of those who care. She puts them all in but they're all gone somewhere else, filling some other trough that she doesn't know about, so small she can barely see it from where she is.
She is as whole as she has ever been but she is still so empty.
"I have bad news and worse news," Caitlyn says with that rueful smile of hers that Vi comes to hate and love in impossibly equal measures.
Vi's heart cracks in half, splits into jagged edges that slice right through.
She sits there in the cold until her cheeks are numb because no one tells her to “Cease this foolishness and come inside at once,” because the words float around in her ears and she can hear them, she can. She can. Stars above, she can hear them and she knows she doesn't hear them but she can and that is what matters.
She walks down the steps eventually.
She's too old to sleep rough, doesn't have the blankets or the equipment to be out there under the stars that have started to come winking into wakefulness. She doesn't remember which one it is that Caitlyn once said was older than all of them put together, which one has light that is only now reaching her from when they'd first met. She wishes she did but there is so much, too much. She can no more hold the ocean in her hands than she can rein in all the clouds and every single drop that leaks burns as it goes.
Is it bad that she'd never thought she'd be the one left?
Is it mean that she'd always assumed she'd go first?
Is it cowardly that she'd never wanted this, has tried so hard, doesn't know how to pick up the pieces of what they used to be, can't figure out how to form them back into the shape of one person?
They say grief comes in waves, that it comes quick to overwhelm, that it comes all at once, impossible to hold back. They say it ebbs, that it will always return, that the time between each blow grows ever longer, that joy and contentment and happiness can be found again in the spaces.
That's the kind of thing Caitlyn would have believed in. It's the kind of idea that they'd both been all too keenly acquainted with through their lives. They've both grieved in so many different ways for so many, had not the time to digest the pain until it'd reared its head in a dining room or the middle of a field, at lunch at the station, in the quiet of their bedroom.
But this—
This hurts so deeply, so impossibly, she hadn't even known it possible. And they've been in all sorts of trouble—her hand never healed back right, Caitlyn's knee never really stopped making that low cracking sound. There's a chunk off the top of her ear that's missing and she barely remembers what Caitlyn had looked like with two eyes. She was there when Caitlyn's mother was murdered, was there when Vander died again and again each time the hole in her heart stretched wide open, a gaping maw ever starving.
But nothing compares to this.
Nothing does because even as part of her wants desperately to believe that there is a world in which she will be happy again, part of her wants that to never be true.
