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“Cait, don’t let that slip,” Vi’s voice is soft but urgent. So is the gentle pressure she exerts on Caitlyn’s elbow, coaxing it back up. “You want the swelling to go down.”
“I know,” Caitlyn mutters. This is hardly her first shiner, but she dutifully follows Vi’s instructions, pressing the towel back against her eye with a wince. It hurts, the flesh is tender and painful, but what’s worse is how it impairs her vision completely. It’s hard, not panicking, when her mind and body both flinch at the cold and the pain and the darkness.
She’s so much more aware of how fragile her eye is, how difficult to injure, how impossible to repair, past a certain point of damage. It’s hard, especially with the kind of mind she has, obsessive by nature, not to get lost in the possibilities. What if major damage had occurred? Her vision had been blurred after the hit — not uncommon between the swelling and the pain and the irritation. And Vi had looked at it before Caitlyn had begun icing it, had assured her there was no visible blood pooling, no signs of severe damage, but what if something had changed since Caitlyn covered it? She has to grit her teeth hard to fight back the urge to pull the towel down and demand Vi look at it again, even though she had checked at Caitlyn’s insistence not five minutes before.
“When we get back, I’m starting a formal review of the state of our safehouses around Piltover and Zaun,” Caitlyn says darkly, shifting the towel against her eye gingerly. “The lack of readily accessible medical supplies is honestly appalling. A safe house with frozen fruits, but no proper ice packs. What kind of operation are we running, exactly? With the amount of funding dumped into this program. This is unacceptable. Utterly unacceptable.”
There’s real anger in her voice. She can feel more than see Vi cringe to hear it and hates herself for it even more. It’s not the damned peaches or the overall sorry state of the safehouse it’s— it’s Caitlyn. Caitlyn’s distraction, Caitlyn’s sloppiness that had landed them here. She had been overconfident, trusting that the quick reconnaissance she’d done on the suspected shimmer den they’d been raiding was thorough enough, that she’d accounted for each of the hostiles present, that she had accurately assessed and accounted for all possible threats.
That oversight had put them both in danger, had allowed one of the slumped over shimmer fiends in the corner that Caitlyn had written-off as too incapacitated to be a threat to slink away in the chaos, to spread the alarm, to bring another pack of thugs down on them, turning the odds against them despite their better equipment, better training.
Vi had been following her lead, at Caitlyn’s insistence. She’d taken a nasty blow to the stomach, had crumpled in half and Caitlyn had panicked, utterly, failed her training, utterly, and rushed to her without thinking, leaving herself open for the elbow strike that had nearly taken her out of the fight. She barely remembers how they got away, just the feeling of Vi’s shoulders steadying her, Vi’s arm around her waist, a vague memory of mumbling directions to the safehouse to her as they slunk down a maze of alleyways and tunnels.
“Sorry, Cupcake. Best I could do,” Vi says, tensely. Caitlyn has enough sense about her to realize that going on like this is making everything worse. “Hold still.”
The world is dark and silent, but for Vi’s quiet breathing, the faint metallic snick of a pair of scissors. Caitlyn’s eye throbs. The side of her face is numb with cold. She thinks of what her life would look like without any vision at all and has to swallow back a sob.
“Hey,” Vi’s voice, terrified and breathless, her hands on Caitlyn’s shoulders. “Hey, what’s happening? What are you feeling?”
“I,” Caitlyn takes in a shuddering breath, as Vi pulls the towel away from her face. Frozen peaches shift in place inside the bag under the cloth, slowly thawing from the heat of Caitlyn’s face. She feels shame and frustration welling up inside her, intensifying further at the look of abject fear and pain on Vi’s face as she peers down at Caitlyn. “I suppose I’m a bit overwhelmed. It’s okay. Keep going.”
“How’s the pain?” Vi asks.
“It’s not bad,” Caitlyn says, which might be true. The aching of her face is nothing, it’s the sick feeling in her stomach she can’t shake.
“I’m almost done,” Vi says quietly and gestures to the mirror.
Caitlyn takes a deep breath, looking over her shoulder. She has to blink to clear her vision but once she does, her own image comes into focus. Good eye swollen and bruised, uniform disheveled, streaked with filth, blood staining her collar. Vi had cleaned most of it up off the side of her face, from where a rampaging shimmer addict had torn free a bloody hank of Caitlyn’s hair.
I can fix that, Vi had said, wiping the blood off of Caitlyn’s scalp, her neck, carefully pulling free the strands of broken and torn hair as Caitlyn had first pressed the makeshift ice pack into her eye and clenched her jaw as hard as she could. Numbly, Caitlyn had nodded, agreeing to let Vi tidy up her hair. It had hardly made sense to Caitlyn in the moment — she would have agreed to nearly anything Vi suggested. Vi had produced a pair of scissors from a drawer in the kitchen and then guided Caitlyn to the dank, cramped bathroom of the safehouse unit, pushed Caitlyn down onto the closed toilet seat lid, and started speaking: I used to cut my own hair all the time, she’d said. Caitlyn had already known this. I did it for—for my— for Powder and the boys, sometimes, too. Even gave Vander a trim once, when he broke his hand breaking up that bad fight in the bar over Snowdown.
She had kept rambling. Caitlyn had hardly retained any of it, nodding along dimly. Now she feels a brief flush of shame for having blinded herself to the anxiety in Vi’s voice, the desperation. She’s been terrified, you fool.
This sobers Caitlyn. As does the sight in the mirror. The bloodied, uneven mess that she'd glimpsed as Vi had ushered her into the bathroom was gone, replaced with an altogether shorter cut — a little asymmetrical by necessity, but passable. Stylish, even. Not exactly common to Piltovan sensibilities, but not dissimilar to some of the more daring hairstyles Caitlyn had seen young women and men in Zaun sporting.
Vi has a real talent for this, she thinks absently. And then, of course. Because there were so many things Vi did and did well. So many skills—both the extravagant and the practical. So many things Caitlyn had never had to consider doing — mending her own clothes, cutting her own hair — Vi knew how to do them, accomplished them with the same quiet competency she brought to so much else.
When Caitlyn first noticed the uniform coat with the torn cuff that she’d intended to have fixed appear back in her closet— mended with bright, golden thread— she’d been taken aback, but she had known it could only be Vi’s doing right away. None of her staff would have chosen to make the repair so noticeable. Vi hadn’t pointed it out to her, hadn’t sought praise or attention. This was a softer gesture, something almost shy. A glimpse of the domesticity that Vi had grown up steeped in, a casual down-to-earth caretaking that Caitlyn found both alien and indescribably precious.
“Thank you,” she says quietly, throat tight with emotion, reaching up a hand to brush her fingers through the trimmed edges of her hair.
“I know you like to keep it longer,” Vi says. “And I’m no professional. We can go get it touched up as soon as we get back topside — after the doctor clears you, anyway. But I knew you probably wouldn’t want to show up at the station looking so—”
“Bloody awful,” Caitlyn fills in wryly. She still looks awful — there’s no fixing that. Her eye, a swollen and split bottom lip, the state of her uniform, the haggard expression she can’t seem to shake. She truly does look terrible. All except for her hair — carefully tended to by Vi’s hands, because she wanted to fix what she could. Because she had anticipated what Caitlyn needed before she had the wherewithal to think of it for herself. Because Vi took care of the people she loved, and Caitlyn was lucky enough to count herself among them.
“Well, I was going to say ‘unkempt’,” Vi offers a hesitant grin. “So you don’t hate it?”
“No. It’s nice,” Caitlyn says and it’s true, though it feels surreal to be having this conversation now when just moments ago she’d been on the verge of a panic attack. It’s at this point she realizes she’s calmed down considerably. Her breathing is more even, her eye, though swollen and a little teary, is unbloodied in the mirror and focuses easily. “I suppose you could add ‘new haircut’ to the list of things I didn’t see coming today.”
It’s a weak joke, but Vi laughs heartily, relief and real pleasure rippling across her beautiful face. She reaches for Caitlyn carefully, brushing her fingertips gently over the still-smarting skin of Caitlyn’s scalp. “When this heals, you should let me shave down the side. I think you’d look good.”
Caitlyn wrinkles her nose, staring at her reflection in the mirror, trying to imagine it. “You think so?”
“Totally. Kinda badass, y’know?”
Badass. “That seems more your style,” Caitlyn points out. “I’m not sure I could pull it off.”
“Well, not with that attitude,” Vi says, then shrugs. “Sleep on it. Maybe you’ll come around.”
“Thank you, Violet,” Caitlyn says, reaching up to tangle her fingers with Vi’s. She brings Vi’s knuckles, bruised and still hot from her gloves up to her lips, kisses them softly. Then she winces when her smile becomes too wide, sending a fresh wave of pain shooting through her eye socket. “Ow.”
“Okay, Sheriff,” Vi says, taking Caitlyn’s wrist and guiding the frozen peaches back to her face. “Keep icing.”
“Frozen fruit,” Caitlyn mutters sourly. “Not a single proper ice pack. I suppose I should count myself lucky we hadn’t stocked the place with ice lollies and sorbet.”
“Can we add that to the budget?” Vi asks, the steady snick of the scissors resuming as she works on the finishing touches. “Might be good for cheering up certain grumpy officers of the law when they wind up here after a rough job.”
“Shut up,” Caitlyn says, smiling hard enough to hurt again. “This is why you’re not on the budget committee, you know.”
Vi laughs and keeps working.