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Caitlyn woke up in the middle of the night.
It wasn’t unusual, but normally she was woken by the bed-sweat of a nightmare, or the sensation of Vi getting into or rolling out of bed, which had become progressively rarer as Vi stopped sleeping with her. It wasn’t anything personal, Vi kept assuring her; her eyes were shadowed as she smiled. Caitlyn figured there were some things you couldn’t keep in the aftermath of a war, and watching the relationship slip between her fingers she felt helpless to do anything else.
Trying to orient herself, eyes staring at the ceiling as her heart started to hammer, there was a small movement at the end of the bed. Caitlyn in half a second had the gun out from under her pillow and pointed at—at—
Jinx, sitting like a gargoyle at the end of the bed, tilted her head, fringe shifting away from her face. Her eyes were wide and pink, and if Caitlyn didn’t know better, she’d call them innocent. “Gun under your pillow?” Jinx said, and it was her, there was no one else it could be. Her voice had a sort of rasp to it that probably came from growing up in Zaun, though Vi didn’t share it. “Some people would call that paranoid.”
Yes, she’d gotten enough of that from Vi, thanks. “I’m feeling very justified right now,” Caitlyn said, voice shaking.
“Aww,” Jinx pouted. “I thought maybe we’d moved past that.”
“You killed my mother,” Caitlyn snarled.
Jinx flinched, an odd thing. It looked like an eye tic, eyes darting to something right over Caitlyn’s shoulder that she knew wasn’t there. “Yeah,” Jinx said. “And you led a monster right into the center of Piltover. I guess you earned your lesson, though. An eye for an eye, right?”
Caitlyn’s finger tightened on the trigger, the phantom pain of the blade slicing through her cornea flaring up again with an ache.
“Anyway, you don’t seem surprised enough that I’m alive,” Jinx said. “And you don’t strike me as a girl that talks to ghosts.”
“Rats like you always make it out,” Caitlyn said. Jinx just kept making steady eye contact from underneath her hair. The purple dye had washed out and the hair she had shaved off had grown back enough for it to brush her shoulders. The smudged black around her eyes was still ever-present. “Besides, this is my city. I know the air vents.”
Jinx smiled. “Heh.”
For some reason, that caused Caitlyn to lower the gun. Revenge didn’t feel like it would satiate her the way that she once thought it would. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Oh, you know,” Jinx said. “I was in town.”
Caitlyn knew without asking that Jinx hadn’t given Vi a visit first. That didn’t surprise her, really, after these months of silence, of Vi grieving a sister. There was something else she knew, too: Jinx coming back wouldn’t make Vi un-grieve her. In a lot of ways, it would fix nothing at all. That’s why neither of them, Caitlyn nor Jinx, had told her yet. That the ghost of her sister was haunting Caitlyn.
“Vi’s not here,” Jinx said, though it was a question.
“She’s not,” Caitlyn said.
“After all that,” Jinx murmured. “How is she?”
“Devastated.”
“Right,” Jinx said, picking at her cuticles.
“You should tell her,” Caitlyn said. “That you’re back.”
“I’m not,” Jinx said, and she uncurled and slid off the bed. “I just wanted to say hi.” She smiled and, in a blink, was over by the window. “Seeya.” She hoisted herself out of the window with an ease that was somewhat suspicious, if Caitlyn chose to linger over it.
She didn’t go back to sleep.
XXX
The second time she jerked awake in the middle of the night, Jinx was leaning over her. Without thinking about it, Caitlyn tackled her backwards, pinning her to the bed. Jinx landed with an oomph.
“Jeez, I’m not your girlfriend,” Jinx grunted. “At least give me a second to warm up.”
Caitlyn recoiled, releasing her arms, and Jinx laughed. “What are you doing here?”
It had been a couple weeks. Just enough time for Caitlyn to start doubting it had happened at all; but it had. Caitlyn didn’t have a lot, now, but she had her sanity. That was probably more than everyone in this room could say.
“For some reason I thought it would be a friendlier second reunion,” Jinx said. “But you’re right down to business, aren’t you?” She glanced to the side, pointedly. “Still sleeping alone, I see.”
“You knew that,” Caitlyn said. “Or you wouldn’t be here.”
Jinx clicked her tongue. “Well, you’re a smart cookie.”
Caitlyn was still sitting above her. Sprawled out in the dark, Jinx looked paler than she normally did. She really looked nothing like Vi at all, except for the fact that her upper lip tugged up in an asymmetrical kind of way as she watched Caitlyn examine her. “Assessing my threat level?”
No. She should’ve been. Here she was, entranced by a girl’s body in her bed. This is exactly the thing that pulled her into this entire situation in the first place. Taken by an odd sort of curiosity, she placed her hand on Jinx’s chest, to see if her heartbeat was fast. It should have been. It wasn’t; it was soft and leisurely under her hand, like Jinx was exactly where she wanted to be.
Caitlyn snatched her hand back. “What do you want from me?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jinx said, blowing her hair out of her eyes and tilting her head against her shoulder. Her eyes drifted away idly. She traced the blanket with her thumbnail, and Caitlyn noticed that most of that pink-and-blue nail polish she normally sported had been chipped off somewhere along the way. “Five thousand gold pieces. Five hundred thousand gold pieces. An entire circus, with an elephant. Five hundred million elephants.”
“I am not made of gold,” Caitlyn said.
“What are you made of, then?” Jinx asked, suddenly, her gaze suddenly snapping bright and intense back to Caitlyn’s.
It was a nonsense question with no answer.
“I’m not made of time, either,” Caitlyn said. “Or patience. Or… elephants.”
“All of the things you aren’t,” Jinx said. “Let’s see. You aren’t a good leader, you aren’t a good girlfriend, you aren’t a good daughter—”
Caitlyn’s hand was around Jinx’s throat before she could stop it, and Jinx’s face split into a mean grin even as she cut off Jinx’s airways. She could kill her. It would be easy. And Vi would never know, because Jinx was already dead.
But she’d let vengeance carry her away before. She pulled her hand back, and Jinx coughed a little. “You are a nasty piece of work,” Jinx wheezed.
“Get out,” Caitlyn said.
“It’s alright,” Jinx said, panting. Her fingers came up to probe around her windpipe. “I’m not a good daughter, either.”
It shouldn’t have made Caitlyn feel better. But it did.
Jinx splayed her hand over her own throat, mimicking Caitlyn’s hold. She was still breathing oddly, and then she smiled again, that same mean grin. “So you’re into this, huh?”
“Get out,” Caitlyn snapped, shoving her, and this time Jinx followed the motion, rolling off the bed and landing feet-first on the floor. “And don’t come back.”
“I hear you,” Jinx said, hoisting herself up and out of the window in that easy way. It was not at all the correct response, with the correct response being I won’t. It means Caitlyn should put a gun back under her pillow.
She didn’t.
XXX
Caitlyn had time to contemplate it, over the next two months. Jinx thought she was doing something for Vi, keeping herself away like she was. Maybe she was.
Why wasn’t Caitlyn shooting her in the head? Three reasons.
The first, for Vi. Caitlyn just didn’t think Vi would appreciate that, all things considered. Even though things weren’t the same, Caitlyn still loved her. She wasn’t going to kill her sister.
The second, for herself. She wasn’t a killer. She knew that now. To do so would be to regress, and to let Jinx push her into regressing.
The third, for Jinx. Really, she felt bad for her, at this point. She looked small in the dark, and defenseless. She likely wasn’t, but it didn’t change her shape, and Caitlyn had started to understand what Vi saw, when she held back her punches. There was another angle to this: Jinx probably wanted to be killed, if what Caitlyn understood to be true was, in fact, true. She didn’t feel particularly inclined to help that along.
And if she wasn’t killing her, then there was no harm in this habit of Jinx’s, even if it was a bit odd. To different people, it could have been freakish, even, but they had both been through too much.
Which was to say—
The third time, when Jinx woke her up, it was with a hand on her throat.
Caitlyn startled awake like she always did, and then lay there, panting. The hand didn’t press; it wasn’t violent. Jinx was observing her reactions, steadily.
“I bruised, last time,” Jinx said conversationally.
“My apologies,” Caitlyn said stiffly.
Jinx smiled and pulled back, letting go of Caitlyn’s throat. Caitlyn laid still. Jinx was sitting beside her, and was unnaturally warm where their bodies brushed through the blanket. The smile was odd on Jinx’s face, small, but it tugged the same lines into her face that Vi’s smile did. “How is everything?”
“You don’t know?” Caitlyn asked, correctly interpreting everything as in the state of Zaun, and not inquiring into Caitlyn’s well-being.
“I’m not really in town a lot,” Jinx said.
“Right,” Caitlyn said. “Reconstruction efforts are going well. Sevika is on the Council. Mel… left.”
She refused to think about Ambessa dying in front of her. Her bad eye itched.
“We’re trying to improve Zaunite infrastructure,” Caitlyn continued.
“Right,” Jinx said. “So that one person—no names—can’t singlehandedly wipe out entire boroughs with chemical warfare?”
Caitlyn nodded, tightly. “Exactly.”
Jinx’s hair kept falling in her eyes, with the way she was hovering over Caitlyn. Her hair was longer, now, but unbraided. She was clearly still getting used to it. She was—was—beautiful, was the word that came to mind, unbidden.
“Do you need someone to braid your hair?” Caitlyn asked, and it came out more patronizing than she meant it to.
Jinx’s head snapped up to something Caitlyn couldn’t see or hear. “Shut up,” she snarled.
Caitlyn stayed quiet.
“You can, if you want,” Jinx said, now speaking to her again.
Caitlyn cautiously pushed herself into a seated position, and Jinx spun around. She made slower work of it than she should have: every time her fingers brushed Jinx’s bare neck or shoulders, Jinx tensed a little, and then released the tension with a shudder. A girl unfamiliar with touch.
“Just one braid, for now,” Caitlyn said. “You don’t have enough hair for two braids not to look ridiculous. Not that they ever didn’t.”
“Hey,” Jinx complained.
Caitlyn smiled, despite herself. She finished off the braid with a hair tie she had lying on her dresser. “There you go,” she said, glancing up.
Jinx had twisted around, so they were now face-to-face. Too close.
“I’m going to try something,” Jinx said.
“Yes?” Caitlyn asked.
Jinx leaned in and kissed her, quick like a thief, and Caitlyn leaned into it before she could tell herself not to.
Then Jinx was up and out of the bed, tossing herself through the window. “Catch you later!” she crowed, tail end of her braid already disappearing from sight.
Caitlyn pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and kept smiling. Ridiculous girl. She had no doubt, this time, that Jinx was going to be back again. She’d make sure to keep the windows locked for her. Jinx loved a challenge.