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The Piltover County Courthouse smelled like old carpet and bad coffee, which Vi had decided years ago was the official scent of justice.
She found her usual spot in the gallery: second row from the back, left side, good angle on both the witness stand and the prosecutor’s table. Setting her bag down, she pulled out the large spiral sketchbook with the city seal on the cover (the official one, the one she’d expense), and flipped to a fresh page.
The hearing hadn’t started yet. The defense attorney was shuffling papers. Someone in the jury box was already half-asleep. Vi picked up her charcoal pencil and started loosening up her hand with some quick thumbnails of the room layout. Standard Tuesday.
Then the side door opened.
Vi looked up, because that’s what you do when a door opens, and then she kept looking, because that’s what you do when the person walking through it looks like that.
The prosecutor was tall, dark-haired, dressed in a pale blue blazer that somehow made the whole courtroom look underdressed by comparison. She walked to her table with the kind of posture you only get from a lifetime of people telling you you’re going somewhere, and meaning it: back straight, chin up, like the room had been waiting for her. She set down a leather folio, said something quiet to her paralegal, and then glanced up at the gallery. Not at Vi specifically, just a general sweep of the room.
Vi looked back down at her sketchbook.
Okay. She thought. Cool. Fine.
She did her job. She sketched the witness –a nervous man in his forties with a bad tie– and the judge, and the defense attorney making an objection that went nowhere.
Then, she sketched the jury foreperson taking notes, and the wide establishing shot the editor always wanted.
And maybe, a couple of times, she also sketched the prosecutor.
Just for practice. Faces are hard. You have to keep practicing faces.
She also –and this was purely incidental, purely observational– noticed the small gap between the prosecutor’s front teeth when she spoke, and the precise clipped vowels of whatever accent that was, and she thought, somewhat helpless: oh, that’s gonna be a problem.
Back at her apartment that evening, Vi made pasta and ate it standing over the sink, which had been her standard evening routine since she was seventeen and waiting tables in the Lanes, and didn’t have a table of her own worth sitting at. Some things stuck even when the circumstances changed. She'd done some other things too, between then and now. But drawing had been the constant through all of it.
She washed up, changed into sweats, and sat on the couch with the full intention of watching something.
Instead, she picked up her personal sketchbook (the beat-up one with the taped spine, the one nobody ever saw), and started drawing.
She told herself she was just doing figure studies. Proportions. The line of a jaw, the set of shoulders. Purely technical.
She filled four pages.
She looked at them for a moment. The prosecutor mid-sentence, one hand raised slightly. A three-quarter view from the side. A quick loose sketch from when she’d been looking down at her notes, a small furrow between her brows.
Vi closed the sketchbook and put it face-down on the coffee table.
“You don’t even know her,” she said to herself, out loud, in her empty apartment.
She picked up the remote and put on something with explosions, which helped. Somewhat.
Caitlyn had not slept enough, which was typical, and her coffee had gone lukewarm somewhere between the parking garage and the courthouse steps, which was a genuine tragedy that she would be processing for some time.
Pushing through the side entrance, she nodded to the bailiff, and made her way to her table with the mechanical efficiency of someone running on routine and spite. The Harwick case was in its third week and she was ready for it to be done –not because she doubted her preparation, but because she’d been living with it long enough that she’d started dreaming about financial fraud, which was not the kind of dream that leaves you rested.
She reviewed her notes. She talked through the afternoon with her paralegal. She did a sweep of the gallery –habit, always know your room– and that’s when she saw the sketch artist again.
She’d noticed her the previous week, briefly. Hard not to; she was the only person in the room who looked genuinely interested in everything, head and pencil both in constant motion, taking in the whole space like she was trying to memorize it. Caitlyn had clocked her and thought, very professionally, good jawline, and moved on because she’d had other things to think about.
Now, with a few minutes before the judge came in, she let herself actually look.
The courtroom, it had to be said, was sweltering. Someone had clearly decided that air conditioning was a luxury the justice system could do without, and the result was that the gallery had collectively wilted. The sketch artist had made the pragmatic decision to ditch her jacket entirely and was sitting in just a tank top, pencil already moving, completely unbothered by the heat.
Caitlyn was bothered by the heat.
She was bothered by it in a very specific and newly urgent way, because the sketch artist’s arms were… they were something. They were doing something to the general atmosphere of the room that Caitlyn didn’t feel was entirely fair. Those shoulders. The way the muscles in her forearms shifted when she moved the pencil. She was just drawing, it was a completely normal activity, and yet Caitlyn was standing there holding a lukewarm coffee feeling like she’d missed a step.
There was also, she noticed distantly, a small bead of sweat at the sketch artist’s temple, which should not have been as distracting as it was, yet here they were.
Caitlyn looked away and reorganized her already-organized notes.
Focus. She told herself. Harwick case. Financial fraud. Justice.
The morning session went well, which helped her mood considerably. By the time the judge called the midday recess she felt almost human, and when her paralegal said he’d handle the afternoon prep, she decided, with great personal courage, to go outside.
The courthouse had a small courtyard on the east side –some benches, a few trees that were doing their best– and beyond it, a covered walkway leading to the cafeteria. Caitlyn walked fast because she always walked fast and also because the lukewarm coffee had been absolutely insufficient and she needed something that passed for food.
She was cutting through the walkway, mentally drafting a line of questioning, when she turned a corner and walked directly into someone coming the other way.
It was not a gentle collision. There was a sound. Several things fell.
“Sorry. God, I’m sorry,” Caitlyn reached out instinctively to stabilize, and then they were both crouching down, gathering scattered items, and the other person was saying “no, no, I was looking at my phone, totally my fault–”
And then Caitlyn looked up and it was the sketch artist.
Up close she was –well. There was a lot of her, was the thing. They were crouching at roughly the same level and Caitlyn still had to look up slightly, and she still wasn’t wearing her jacket, and Caitlyn was suddenly extremely aware that she had just walked chest-first into someone who could probably benchpress the judge’s podium. And also that she herself had, arguably, a chest. And that they had just made significant contact, chest to chest.
“I wasn’t watching where I was going,” Caitlyn said, impressively composed. “Completely my fault.”
“I really was looking at my phone,” the woman said. “Equal fault. Democratic fault distribution.”
Despite herself, Caitlyn almost smiled. She reached for a notebook that had fallen face-down and picked it up.
She turned it over to hand it back.
And then she stopped.
The page it had fallen open to was a sketch –quick, charcoal, loose but confident– of a woman at a table, one hand raised, mid-sentence. It took Caitlyn approximately two seconds to recognize the blazer. The posture. The jaw.
It was her.
She turned the page slightly. Next sketch: also her. Side profile, from below. She turned the page again before she could even think about whether she should, and found a softer one –smaller, more careful–, her head tilted down over her notes, and something about the way it was drawn made her chest do something she didn’t immediately have language for.
She looked up.
The sketch artist was frozen, one hand outstretched for the notebook, wearing the expression of someone who had just watched their past, present, and future flash before their eyes simultaneously.
“These are–” Caitlyn started.
“I can explain,” the woman said, at a volume slightly lowered.
“They’re really good.”
A long pause. “... I was not prepared for that sentence.”
Caitlyn looked at the small careful sketch again. She’d been so absorbed during those moments she’d had no idea anyone was paying that kind of attention. “You have a good eye. The angle on this one especially.”
The sketch artist made a sound that might have been words, or might have just been air leaving a human body involuntarily.
Caitlyn handed the notebook back. “I’m Caitlyn. I’d say nice to meet you, except I’ve technically been sitting ten feet away from you for two weeks, so.”
“Vi,” the woman managed, clutching the notebook to her chest like it contained state secrets, which, Caitlyn reflected, it sort of did. Her ears were visibly, adorably pink. “Yeah. I know – I mean. Kiramman. From the docket. I read the docket. For work.”
“Of course,” Caitlyn said gravely.
“I’m going to stop talking.”
“Please don’t,” Caitlyn said, and was genuinely surprised to find she meant it.
They ended up in the cafeteria, which had not been on Vi’s plan for the afternoon, and yet there they were, across from each other at a small table with coffees that were better than Vi’s apartment coffee and worse than Caitlyn’s usual order.
“So how long have you been doing this?” Caitlyn asked. She'd bought something that could, generously, be called a sandwich and she was eating it like a person who didn’t have anywhere else to be, which felt statistically impossible given that she was apparently also preparing to dismantle an entire fraud scheme in front of a jury on Friday.
“Four years,” Vi said. “I freelance for a few outlets. Piltover Chronicle, sometimes the regional TV stations.”
“Do you like it?”
“Yeah, actually.” That part was easy to say. “There’s something about capturing a moment that’s really happening, you know? I like that better than making things up.” She paused. “No offense to people who make things up.”
“None taken on their behalf.” Caitlyn tilted her head slightly. “But you do draw other things. Not just for work.”
There it was. Vi looked at her coffee. “Yeah.”
“How many pages,” Caitlyn said, and it landed somewhere between a question and a fait accompli, “are we talking.”
Vi considered her options. “Four. In the –in the personal one. The other sketchbook has like two or three but that was for the –I mean, I draw everyone in the room, so those aren’t –” She stopped. Caitlyn was doing the thing where she almost smiled, which Vi was already finding catastrophically effective. “Four,” Vi confirmed. “It doesn’t usually –I don’t usually – I just thought you were –your bone structure is just very interesting. Artistically.”
“My bone structure,” Caitlyn said.
“Structurally. As a subject. Architecturally, even.”
“Right.”
“I’ll stop talking.”
“Vi,” Caitlyn said patiently, “I came and sat down with you. I never eat in here – it smells. I’m taking a longer break than I should. I think we can both agree what’s happening here.”
Vi opened her mouth, then closed it. “...What is happening here?”
“I noticed you too,” Caitlyn said, simply, like it was easy, like she hadn't just rearranged the furniture of the entire conversation. “The first week. And then I had work to do, and you had work to do, and I didn’t act on it because I’m not always great at–” she gestured at the general concept of this – “doing something that isn’t about work. But then there was a sketchbook.”
“There was a sketchbook,” Vi agreed, a little faintly.
“So.” Caitlyn looked at her steadily. “Would you want to have dinner with me? Sometime when neither of us is working, preferably.”
The cafeteria hummed around them. Somewhere, someone microwaved something that smelled aggressively of fish. This was, Vi thought, the least romantic setting in the developed world, and she was pretty sure she’d remember it for a very long time.
“Yeah,” she said. “Definitely yes.”
Something in Caitlyn’s expression went a little warmer, a little less composed. “Good.” She took out her phone and slid it across the table. “Put your number in.”
Vi put her number in. When she slid the phone back, their fingers overlapped on the case for a second, and neither of them moved immediately, and the fish smell was still present but Vi had decided to simply not acknowledge it.
Then Caitlyn’s watch beeped. She glanced at it and stood, gathering her folio. “Recess is almost over.”
“Yeah.” Vi stood too, picked up her bag and her sketchbooks –both of them, held securely this time. “Good luck in there.”
“Thank you. Saturday?”
“Saturday.”
“I’ll text you.” She paused at the end of the table. “For what it’s worth, I think it’s nice. That you draw people the way you see them.”
“Thank you,” Vi said, quieter than she'd meant to, softer, like the words had bypassed whatever filter she usually ran everything through. She didn’t look away though.
Caitlyn held her gaze for a moment, something warm and a little considering in her expression, and then she was gone, and Vi sat back down and ordered another coffee.
Then she took out the personal sketchbook and opened it to a new page.
She’d been at it for about two minutes when she realized she was already smiling.
That Saturday, they went to a place Caitlyn knew near the river. Small, candles on the tables, a menu that required some interpretation. Vi showed up in the nicest jacket she owned. Caitlyn showed up in something that made Vi briefly forget what jackets even were.
They talked for hours. Caitlyn ordered wine and explained the outcome of the Harwick case without Vi asking, and Vi found she was genuinely interested, which surprised her, because financial fraud was not normally her thing. Vi talked about the Undercity a little –the Lanes mostly, where she grew up– and Caitlyn listened with her chin in her hand and asked follow-up questions that were actually about what Vi said.
“Draw it for me?” Caitlyn asked. “I keep trying to picture it and I can’t.”
Vi didn’t need to be asked twice. Pen out, napkin grabbed, and she was drawing before Caitlyn had even finished the sentence. She drew for a while –long enough that the restaurant settled around them, long enough that Caitlyn stopped watching the napkin and started watching Vi instead, the focused quiet of her, the way everything else seemed to drop away when her hand was moving.
Then she turned it around.
A rooftop view. The Lanes from above –a tangle of streets and rooflines, chimneys, the suggestion of the river in the distance, a few tiny figures far below. It shouldn’t have worked on a paper napkin and yet it did, completely.
Caitlyn stared at it. “You drew it from above.”
“That’s how I always thought of it.” Vi looked at the drawing. “I used to go up on the rooftops. Best views in the city, and free.” She tapped a spot near the center of the drawing. “This one here, you could see six streets at once. I spent half my childhood up there.”
“Drawing?”
“Drawing. Thinking. Hiding, sometimes.” She said it easily, like it wasn't particularly heavy – or like she'd learned, somewhere along the way, how to carry it lightly. She then looked up and seemed to consider whether to leave it there. “Things got loud at home sometimes. The rooftops were good for that.”
Caitlyn looked at the little drawing, the six streets visible from one spot. “I’m glad you had somewhere to go.”
“Yeah.” Vi said quietly. “Me too.”
A small silence, easy rather than awkward.
“Keep it,” Vi said, nodding at the napkin. “I’ve drawn that view more times than I can count. One more copy in the world won’t hurt.”
Caitlyn took it. Folded it. Held it for a moment before putting it away, like she was making a small decision about it. “Thank you.”
Vi watched her. “What made you ask about the Lanes?”
“You lit up when you talked about it.” Caitlyn said, simply. “I wanted to see more of that.”
Vi opened her mouth. Closed it. Picked up her wine.
“What?” Caitlyn said, with the composure of someone who knew exactly what.
“Nothing.” Vi set her glass down. “Nothing.” She looked across the table. “It’s a good place. Complicated, but good. Made me who I am, for better or for worse.”
“Better, I’d say. From available evidence.”
“Available evidence being a sketchbook full of your face.”
“Available evidence,” Caitlyn said, “extends somewhat beyond the sketchbook.” She held Vi’s gaze for a moment, then let her off the hook: “Did you always want to do the illustration work?”
“Nah. I kind of fell into it. I always drew, but I thought I’d do something else.” Vi turned her glass on the table. “Took me a while to figure out that the thing I was doing for free in every spare minute was maybe the thing I should be doing.”
“What were you doing before?”
“This and that.” Vi smiled at her sideways. “Nothing worth a highlight reel. I got good at a few things, stopped doing them, and eventually figured out the drawing paid better than I expected.”
Caitlyn gave her a look that said she’d noticed the deflection and was choosing to let it go, which Vi appreciated. “And what is it about the courtroom specifically?”
“High stakes,” Vi said. “Everyone in that room wants something. It’s in their face, their posture, all of it. You just have to look.” She paused. “You’re like that. When you’re up there.”
“Like what?”
“You know exactly what you want and you’re not embarrassed about it.” Vi said it easily, like an observation, because it was. “It’s a good look.”
Caitlyn opened her mouth, then closed it. A faint color came up in her face that Vi was quietly, immensely pleased about.
“You’re very–” Caitlyn started.
“I know,” Vi said.
Caitlyn chuckled, startled out of it, and pointed at her. “That. That’s annoying.”
“You’re smiling though.”
“Am not.”
“Miss Kiramman.”
“I’m barely smiling.”
Vi grinned and let it go.
They argued for a while about whether charcoal or ink was more unforgiving, with Caitlyn holding a position she'd admitted upfront she wasn't qualified for.
"Ink is less forgiving," Vi said. "You can't smudge your way out of a bad line."
"Which means charcoal is just ink with an escape hatch."
"That's not–" Vi pointed at her. "That's genuinely wrong and also somehow hard to argue with."
Dessert came, Caitlyn said she didn’t want any, and then ate a third of Vi’s without asking, and when Vi raised an eyebrow she just shrugged like what are you going to do about it.
Vi was, frankly, a little delighted.
At the end of the night, they ended up on the sidewalk outside without quite deciding to, the way you do when neither person is ready to be the one who says okay, so. The air was cooler than it had been all week and Caitlyn had her arms crossed loosely around herself, and Vi had her hands in her pockets, and they were standing close enough that moving away would’ve been a choice.
“I had a good time,” Caitlyn said.
“Yeah,” Vi agreed. “Shockingly good.”
“Shockingly?”
“I had low expectations. Courtroom setting, fish smell…”
“That was one cafeteria, one time–”
“It was a formative moment for me, I’m still recovering.”
Caitlyn was smiling, trying not to, losing. Vi looked at her for a second –the candlelight still somehow on her face out there, the gap in her teeth when her mouth curved up– and then she leaned in and pressed a kiss to her cheek. Slow. Unhurried. And maybe, just maybe, a few millimeters closer to the corner of her mouth than was strictly friendly.
She pulled back.
Caitlyn hadn't moved. She was looking at Vi with an expression that was doing several things at once, all of them interesting.
“That,” Caitlyn said, very composed for someone whose cheeks were slightly pink, “was a very calculated placement.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Vi said.
“Next time,” Caitlyn said, taking one small step back with the air of someone making a strategic retreat on their own terms, “you pick the place.” A pause. “And I’ll pick where I kiss you.”
Vi opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
Caitlyn smiled –the real one, the unguarded one– turned, and walked to her car. Vi stood on the sidewalk, watching her go, and thought, distantly, that she should probably say something.
She didn’t.
She drove back home with the windows down, and when she got in she went straight for the sketchbook, already smiling before she’d even found a clean page.
