Chapter Text
She can’t move.
Everything around her is fire and blood. Scorching hot metal pinning her down. Twisting her shoulder. Crushing the breath from her lungs. Blood in her mouth, a copper coin. The tang of it in the air as she sobs. Heaving for breath.
She knows her brothers are here. Knows her father is here. Her sister is here. Can’t see them, but she knows.
All dead. Their bodies broken. Just out of her line of sight—but Vi knows.
She messed it all up. They’re all dead. They’re dead.
She killed them, and she’s going to die here too.
The fire throws jagged, monstrous shadows. Inside them, something moves—something too big to fight. She is too weighed down to run. She twists and strains. A worm on a hook. A worm under a boot, too brainless to know it’s doomed. Scared to get what she deserves.
Were they scared? Was Powder—
“Vi!” calls a voice. It doesn’t belong here. The voice is cool like water. Clear and blue. “Vi, where are you?”
“Stuck,” she sobs. Her lungs heave desperately. “I’m stuck.”
“I’m going to help you,” says the voice, cutting through the heat. Prickling the inside of her skull. “Can you hear me, darling? I’m here. I’ve got you.”
The weight she’s under lifts away. Somehow, the fire recedes. Vi doesn’t trust it—there’s still a monster here, and the dead. Her limbs are all too heavy to lift. She curls into a ball instead, tight as she can, hands over the back of her neck.
“Vi,” says the voice, closer now. Steady. Not afraid. “You’re having a nightmare. You’re on the couch, in our apartment in Piltover. You’re safe. I’m right here with you, love. I’m right here.”
“They’re dead. Everyone’s dead.”
“I’m not dead,” soothes the voice. Vi is so parched for it—soaks it up like a weed in cracked, dry earth. “You’re not in danger anymore. You survived this, Violet, and now you’re here in our apartment. With the beautiful balcony that you won’t let me lock the door to. If you open your eyes, you’ll be able to see the sun coming in through the curtains you picked out, the lace with the sweet little birds.”
The suggestion is made with such gentle surety that Vi wants to believe it. Wants to try, because it has to be better, it has to be better than where she is right now.
She opens her eyes, and sees light. Steady beams of sunlight, instead of the flickering of flames; it puddles invitingly across a rug of muted green and purple and blue, a rug just like the one in their living room, so plush under Vi’s toes. Where she lay, luxuriating, the afternoon they moved in, and Cait lay down over her and under her and—
Cait.
Caitlyn is on her knees by the side of the couch, watching Vi with one piercing blue eye. The other tracks Vi too, as well as it can, the deep pink blossom of the prosthetic shadowed under Cait’s worried brow. There’s a fading bruise high on her cheekbone, on the sighted side of her face, yellowing at the edges. That’s why Vi was sleeping on the couch, she now remembers. Even though Cait didn’t want her to.
“You’re safe, Vi,” Cait tells her, with relieving certainty.
Vi scrambles off the couch and crawls into arms that open for her without hesitation. That hold her sweaty, shaking body tight. Cait smells like their bed, like slept-in sheets and floral goops.
“You found me,” Vi says, nonsensically, as if they’d been playing hide and seek. As if Cait strode into the burning building of Vi’s memory and carried her out of there herself.
“I’ll always find you,” Cait tells her, face pressed into her hair. “Always.”
“I didn’t hurt you?”
“You were screaming.” A careful hand strokes through Vi’s hair. “You fell asleep under my weighted blanket. Maybe we should put it away for a while.”
Last night returns in moonlight-tinted flashes; stretching out on the couch, sleepless, aching for the familiar pressure of Caitlyn sprawled on her chest or plastered to her back. “I missed you laying on me.”
Caitlyn kisses her hairline, pulling in a breath so deep that Vi can feel her chest expand. “I missed you in our bed.”
“It’s just until the nightmares—”
“I’d rather be right next to you when they start and risk a bruise or two than wake up hearing you screaming and not know where you are.” When Vi hides her face in Cait’s shoulder instead of answering, Cait sighs deeply again. “Come back to bed with me for a little while.”
“It’s morning already.”
“It’s still early. We have time enough for a cuddle.”
Vi has run out of excuses; there are few things she loves more than a morning cuddle, and Caitlyn knows it. So she lets herself be herded down the hall and into their bed, and she drinks a little water when it’s handed to her, and then as Cait starts to get in too Vi very selfishly doesn’t even let her lie down—just burrows into her lap, nose pressed into her stomach, arms around her waist. Embarrassed. Ashamed. She doesn’t want kisses yet, doesn’t want to see the bruise she left days ago on the perfect cheek of the woman who is going to be her wife.
So she tries to just breathe through it, the lingering cocktail of fear-sorrow-guilt. Because they’ve talked about it all before, and Caitlyn has asked her to wait half an hour after a nightmare before she tries to apologize or call the wedding off. The first time, four times before the bruise on Cait’s face, Vi hadn’t even been able to cry as she said it. Sometimes she can’t, after nightmares, like now. Like if she lets go, she will absolutely fall into pieces and die of it. So dry-eyed and shaking she told Caitlyn that they shouldn’t get married after all, and Cait had cried, just sobbed, and gotten so angry, and they sorted it out eventually by establishing some ground rules.
Vi is not allowed to call off the wedding:
- within thirty minutes of waking from a nightmare.
- when she’s drunk.
- when she’s on the rag, which is a thing that unfortunately happens regularly now.
Caitlyn is not allowed to call off the wedding:
- after less than five hours of sleep in any 24-hour period.
- when reporters or High House busybodies try to pry into Vi’s history.
- when pissed-off Zaunites throw trash as she passes, or get up and leave the bathysphere because she’s on it, or any other shitty expression of disapproval.
According to the rules, calling off the wedding requires a minimum of four hours of discussion, with mandatory cool-off periods of at least one meal and one sleep (or nap), and parental mediation by the only parent they have left between them. Vi privately thinks that Tobias only agreed to this in order to get them out of his office so he could get back to organizing the clinic shift schedule, but a deal is still a deal.
And so far, the wedding is still on.
Cait is petting her hair, wriggling long fingers through the strands of the braid Vi wears it in to sleep so it doesn’t get too tangled. Unraveling it, and stroking the strands out along Vi’s upper back, against the satin of her pajama top. It feels so good, as Vi breathes and breathes. She wishes she had taken her top off to sleep, because Cait’s fingers on her bare skin would feel even better. The sun is coming in this room too—Piltover has so much sun, even in the winter—and Vi absorbs the gentle heat of it like a hungry plant. Builds the room around them in her mind: their sprawling bed beneath the window, gauzy curtains closing it off from the rest of the room; the wardrobe and the chest of drawers along one wall, the doublewide vanity along the other. Shelves they’ve only just begun to populate with trinkets and pictures and books. Cozy and secure. Their own little warren.
Bit by bit the nightmare loosens its grip, and Vi feels less like she needs to be punted forcefully into the deepest trench of the Sump, and feels more like she needs to see Cait’s beautiful face again. Just to get her bearings. To make sure. So she uncurls and leans back enough to look up at Cait, who’s still sitting up with her legs folded under her, Vi’s arms and hands tightly framing her hips.
“There you are,” says Cait, in a voice like honeyed hot tea. The fingers combing out Vi’s hair move to her face, stroking the thin skin at her temple where her pulse is still thudding, then the worried clench of her jaw. Caitlyn doesn’t look like she’s regretting ever breaking Vi out of Stillwater. She’s making the purse-lipped face that means she wants to kiss Vi but is holding back out of caution for the intensity of the moment. It’s a very specific look. Vi wonders how many other very specific looks she’ll discover, when they’re married. When they’re old and wrinkly and have looked at each other in every possible way for dozens and dozens of years. She wants to find out, and also she feels more ready for kisses now, so she tips onto her back with one arm still snaked around Cait’s hip and a hand just enough above her ass to be respectful.
“Here I am,” Vi says, a little mournful and hoarse, stretching out in the bed and trying to look like good cuddling material.
In spite of the invitation, Cait doesn’t lay down next to her. She bends like a willow branch instead and drops a kiss right between Vi’s eyebrows. “My darling.” Two more on the apples of her cheeks. “My love.” Vi squirms, the last remnants of shame and terror warming into lighter, tender melancholy. She kicks at the covers where they’re scrunched down by her feet as gentle fingers stroke her sternum, the notch of her collarbone, exposed above the neck of her pajamas. Cait smiles, and kisses the tip of her nose. “My sweet bunny.”
“You’re the bunny in this relationship, I think,” Vi protests, as Cait passes right over her ready mouth to kiss her chin instead.
Cait pulls back just enough to look her square in the eye. “Are you insinuating something about my teeth?”
“Yeah,” says Vi. “That I love them. I love them so much I want to marry them.”
Cait’s brows twitch eloquently. “They are part of the whole package you’ve signed up for, I suppose.” Then she kisses the scar on Vi’s lip, a grippy, tasting sort of kiss, and Vi tilts up to fit their mouths together.
“Lucky me.”
But when Vi reaches for her, tries to draw Cait down or lift herself more, Cait resists with gentle pressure on her shoulders. Settles Vi back into the bed with a look so blatantly, searingly loving it makes Vi feel like she might explode. “Rest a little while longer,” Cait murmurs. “Close your eyes and let me dote on you.”
Vi sighs out a breath, swallowing all the things that still clog the back of her throat, the things she’s agreed not to say for at least another—she glances quickly at the clock on the night table—eight minutes. Caitlyn really has her over a barrel with the post-nightmare rule. “Whatever my girl wants,” she says instead, closing her eyes as instructed, and sneaking the hand still around Cait’s hip up under her nightshirt to touch the warm skin and fine hairs of her back.
Cait’s hands squeeze where they’re curled over her shoulders, kneading her tight traps through the satin, her shrugged-up delts; then both hands work together over the arm that isn’t getting fresh under Cait’s nightshirt. Down Vi’s bicep, her forearm, her hand that Cait cradles and rubs with careful attention. That Cait kisses—each scabby knuckle, and then the base of her thumb. The pulse in her wrist, humming. A hum that becomes something almost-tuneful, when Cait lays Vi’s hand down and starts tugging open the buttons of her pajama shirt.
It takes Vi a minute to clock it, distracted as she is by the travels of those fingers. Our love is a bubblin’ fountain, our love that flows into a sea, our love, deeper than any ocean… Vi hums along, trying to pick out the harmony, going breathy as Cait opens her shirt and starts to rub mesmerizing circles over the top of her chest.
“Shall we play that one at the reception?” Cait’s voice is nighttime-quiet, even as the sun melts over them. “Or at the ceremony, maybe?” One hand settles firmly, protective, over Vi’s heart; the other slides down the middle of her chest to her stomach and makes a slow circle there. Back up, and down again, a soothing circuit that robs Vi of all ability to formulate words. She settles for an affirmative sound, shifting under Cait’s hands, settling deeper into the bed. Letting her knees butterfly open in lazy suggestion. A suggestion Caitlyn doesn’t take, at least not yet, though her fingers graze the waist of Vi’s pajama pants on each metronomic pass of her palm. She picks up the humming again, in the same rhythm. Soft, and a little bit flat. Vi breathes deeper, lower, just to feel Cait’s touch sweep over the rise and fall of her belly, and she can hear Cait’s smile when she murmurs, “Good girl.”
She’s almost asleep when Cait bends to nudge Vi’s pants all the way down to her ankles; when Cait drapes herself along Vi’s side and across a splayed thigh and the warm puff of her breath reminds Vi that she went to bed last night without underwear. And yet, there’s nothing urgent in this revelation. Nothing in Cait’s touch that stirs anything but a sleepy glow of joy as she lays one hand low on Vi’s belly, with the same tenderness that she covered Vi’s heart. As she curls the other arm under Vi’s thigh like it’s her favorite pillow, peppering the thin secret skin there with leisurely kisses. It’s almost a surprise when Cait’s tongue finds her clit, works it in hot, pulsing drags to the beat of buzzy humming.
Vi thinks she couldn’t open her eyes now if she tried. Couldn’t move from this spot, Cait’s beloved weight sprawled over her, heavy breasts and pointy elbows. Cait’s hip now close enough for Vi to press her cheek to. Her body is waking to pleasure and drifting to sleep in equal and opposite measure, suspended in a blissful limbo where her mind begins to unravel. Throwing up little flashes of the dream, still. The fresh raw edge of grief, and the balm of Cait’s voice; the lace curtains casting soft shadows on the rug, and the bruise Vi put on Cait’s face.
She reaches down to thread her fingers in Cait’s hair. To thumb her sharp cheekbone, a ghost of a touch, and to cradle her head with no demand and no question, just to feel the working of her jaw and the steady living pulse in her neck. The reality of her, this woman who wants to be Vi’s wife, who’s tonguing her like she’s made of ice cream.
Who’s reaching inside of her with slender fingers—two, and then quickly three, Vi’s so wet and wanting and only notices now as the ache is so deeply soothed. It seems impossible that someone so precious, so extraordinary, should want to keep her. To hold her steady as she starts to tremble, as she realizes the whining in her ears is her own breath, gravid with sound, a raincloud ready to burst. Hot sparks flash as Caitlyn’s fingers curl and press, inside and outside, a trick Vi likes to use on her that feels thunderous now. There’s a sweet, unbearable pressure building in the bowl of her hips, and in her chest, and behind her eyes.
And then it breaks, and breaks, and breaks, rolling through her, flooding her cunt and flooding her eyes and ripping Cait’s name wretchedly from her throat.
That astonishing woman who wants to be Vi’s wife just pets and cossets her, kissing up Vi’s body until Vi is in her arms. Raining more kisses all over Vi’s blubbering, snotty face. “That’s it, my dove,” says Cait. “Get it all out. I love you so much. My good, precious girl.”
“That’s you,” Vi insists, as humiliatingly inarticulate as she’s been all morning, played like a fiddle and unable to stop singing out.
“I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.” Caitlyn punctuates each of these with a kiss, and more and more besides, until Vi is reduced to hiccups and something a second cousin to laughter. “I love you when you wake me up screaming, and when you wake up in my arms.” A kiss to her nose ring, with just a hint of tugging teeth. “I love you when you cry, and when you grin at me with your pretty mouth.” Their mouths, together, and Cait’s tongue tasting like Vi. “I love you when you get so nice and relaxed for me that you squirt a little.”
“What?” Vi says, in between kisses. “The sheets—”
Cait hushes her. “Vi, we spent three full days supervising the laundry room renovation specifically so that I could make a mess of you in every set of sheets we own.”
This, at last, makes a real laugh bubble out of Vi’s throat. “What happened to ‘This is for the good of the whole building, Vi,’ and ‘It will ingratiate us to the neighbors, Vi?’”
“Those things are still true. Though some sound dampening might ingratiate us to the neighbors more.”
“You like it when you think they can hear. You get all squirmy.”
Cait’s brows furrow. “I do not.”
She’s so perfect. So wonderful, and good, and safe, and it turns out Vi is selfish enough to marry her after all. So she kisses the little furrow, and then the protesting “o” of her mouth and her sweet bunny teeth. “You do. Like right now.”
Cait squirms; Vi kisses her again, slower. Grateful, and wanting, and Cait blooms to her like a flower in the sun.
***
After breakfast they settle at the kitchen table in their pajamas: Cait in just her stretched-out nightshirt and panties—because their apartment has under-floor heating and also she knows Vi likes to look at her endless legs—and Vi with her buttons still undone, because she likes the look on Cait’s face whenever she glimpses the gleaming silver barbells in Vi’s healing nipples that she’s still not allowed to play with.
It’s a good thing for their productivity that they’ve both come once already this morning.
Methodically, Cait lays out stacks of invitations, two fancy pens, bottles of ink in Kiramman green and a deep, rich purple, and the wax sealing kit.
There are so many steps to a Topside wedding, so many formalities; Vi’s starry-eyed fantasies, all pulled from novels and the occasional newspaper, never involved these tiny details—and Zaun weddings certainly don’t. She and Cait agreed right away on a small, private ceremony, just their closest people, and a bigger reception at the Powder Keg. Simple! But Topside doesn’t function by word-of-mouth alone. A private ceremony necessitated separate sets of save-the-dates, and now separate sets of invitations, lists upon lists upon lists and a whole murderboard in the living room to keep track of guests and addresses and RSVPs.
And of course Tobias is throwing them an enormous rich people party the night before the wedding, to satisfy Cait’s social obligations to the rest of the High Houses—because even though it would be funny, Vi doesn’t actually want all those snobs in the PK—and to have a last hurrah in Kiramman Manor before the renovation to convert most of it into a dorm begins.
It’s kind of bizarre, that they moved out of that house so it could be a dorm, and moved into this building that used to be a dorm but was converted to apartments. Real estate in Piltover just goes round and round. This kitchen, Cait has told her, used to be the shared kitchen for the whole floor; same with their bathroom on the other side of the L-shape the apartment makes.
“Father sent the party invitations yesterday,” Cait tells her now, sliding part of their stack over to Vi.
“He’s gonna need a wrist brace. So glad we didn’t have to write out 300 of those.”
“I would bet money that Father didn’t write them, either. His penmanship is abominable. Probably it was Alonzo.”
“Poor Alonzo, then. Which ones are these?”
“Reception only. I’ve got the ones for the ceremony.”
“Right, where’s that address list…”
Cait passes over two pages of her own cramped writing.
“Thanks.”
A comfortable quiet settles over them, just the steady scrape of Cait’s pen, and Vi’s idle humming as she doodles in the margins of the address list. After a bit, she holds it out. “How’s this?”
Cait looks up; reaches out a finger to trace the curling flourishes of vines and fanned-out leaves and wide-lobed blossoms. A smile breaks over her face. “Beautiful, Vi. You ought to draw more, you’ve clearly got a talent for it.”
“Not like Ekko. Or my sister, even. They were always the artists in the family.” But she flushes a little under the praise.
“Mm.” Caitlyn’s finger drifts from the paper to Vi’s hand, her wrist, up under her sleeve to brush the ink on the side of her forearm. “Well, I might be biased, but I think you have a unique style. I’m very partial to it.”
“You have to say that,” Vi grins.
“I do not,” Cait argues. “We’re not married yet. But if you’re going to decorate every invitation like that, then you’d best get a wriggle on.”
“Get a wriggle on?”
Caitlyn kicks her shin under the table. “You only have six months left to make fun of my accent, you know.”
“We should be keeping track of these rules. We could write a book. Marital Harmony for Topsiders and Trenchers.”
“I’m not sure we’re the prime example of a harmonious couple,” Cait muses, but her voice is cozy-warm, and her socked foot is now soothingly rubbing Vi’s ankle.
Vi grins at her. “Towie used to say, ‘Better too many teeth than too few.’ She meant in the sack, but I think it applies.”
“Wise words from your prison lover.” Coming from anyone else, it might sound condescending; coming from Cait, with her eye sparkling and her shirt sliding off one shoulder, exposing the sucking bites Vi left on her neck earlier, it’s endearingly sincere. “I’d always rather you show your teeth.”
Vi slides a decorated invitation into the envelope she’s just addressed and sets it aside for sealing. One down, thirty-two to go. “Cait.”
“Mm?” That blue eye fixes on her again, attention focusing in like the shifting lenses of a scope. Even the violet eye is pointed right at her, vivid pink and green.
“I love you. No matter what.”
The tips of Cait’s ears flush, where her hair is tucked behind them; her face melts into a look of tender solemnity. The bruise Vi never intended still purples high on her cheekbone. “I love you too,” Cait says. “No matter what.”
It doesn’t solve every problem, to hear it. Doesn’t make the stress they’re under any less potent. It probably won’t make Vi sleep soundly tonight. But it matters, every time, and that’s something. The joy, the balm of it, makes the trouble worthwhile. They smile stupidly at each other for a long minute; then by joint unspoken agreement they turn back to their tasks, with Cait’s foot still hooked around Vi’s ankle under the table.
The sun slowly moves; Vi gets lost in swirls of green ink and light spots and splashes of purple. In penning addresses, if they have them, and bundling together envelopes to hand-deliver where they don’t. Jericho. Thieram. Babette and some of her girls. Several handfuls of Firelights. Some of Tobias’ friends from the clinic; some of Cait’s fellow instructors at EC, and officers from the main precinct they both like, the ones cleared for Zaun. The Council, as a courtesy, even though only Sevika and Shoola will come, with Shoola’s husband and grown children and their partners. Vi doesn’t know Shoola’s family nearly as well as Cait does, but the husband and Sevika have a perpetual pissing contest going and it makes Vi happy to watch them annoy each other.
“Would you like to send something to Towie?” Cait asks, absorbed in her careful calligraphy. “Not an invitation, obviously, but an announcement? A letter? Would that be gauche?”
“Huh,” says Vi, considering it. “Maybe? But I don’t know if I want us to be part of the gossip trade in there, anyway. I didn’t make a lot of friends, and some of them still have connections on the outside.”
“If that’s the case, then surely the news is already going ‘round.” Cait’s pen pauses; she looks over at Vi again. “Anyone we should be worried about?”
Vi chews at the inside of her cheek. “Nah, I guess not. I just don’t like the idea of us as a commodity people get shivved over. Not our wedding, at least.”
“What was Towie in for?” The thinnest thread of steel runs through her tone, and it warms Vi unreasonably to know Cait hasn’t investigated her already.
“Pretty sure she murdered some people. People who probably deserved it. But she was tight with this asshole, Eso. Total sicko. Almost as bad as the guards. He only went in maybe a year before you broke me out, but we hated each others’ guts the whole time.”
“Nero Eso?”
Vi blinks up at Cait; she’s got her detective face on now. “Yeah.”
“His name came up several times during a case I assisted with as a junior officer. It wrapped up with too many unanswered questions, so I kept investigating on my own.”
“Then you know what I mean about him. Fucked up guy. Most of Silco’s goons were just idiots or addicts, plenty of people in Zaun were desperate enough to work for him. But Eso’s a Piltie. Full of himself. He used to brag about how good he was at wetwork.”
“And he worked for Silco…” says Cait, like she wasn’t expecting that—like it changes something.
Vi’s smile tips to one side. “Like I told you, Cupcake. They all did. Far as I could tell from inside, Silco was top of every food chain, one way or another.”
Caitlyn absorbs this information with the kind of gleam in her eye that usually leads to a new murderboard, or at least a few hours engrossed in evidence and incident reports. “I’m not sure what happened to those files. They must have still been in my locker when I was suspended, probably got checked back into evidence—”
“Suspended?”
“Briefly. It didn’t stick.” Her brain’s clearly already buzzing; Vi’s chest pangs with affection watching Cait think, watching her pack her half-written invitations away. She gets to her feet with a thousand-yard expression—then visibly reels herself back in, and bends to meet Vi’s waiting, smiling mouth. “Remind me at bedtime, I’ll tell you about it. I’ve got to get dressed so I can stop by evidence storage before my office hours.”
“Want me to send a tube and tell them to pull all the Nero Eso stuff for you?”
Cait’s expression melts; she kisses Vi again, hungrier. “You’re wonderful.” Then she laughs and bites Vi’s lip when Vi slips a hand up under her nightshirt. “Stop that, I’ll be late.”
“You can’t dangle these in my face and not let me hold them.”
“Darling,” she scolds, a laugh in it that warms Vi right down to her toes. And Cait’s tits! Fantastic. Soft and heavy and they fill Vi’s palms so satisfyingly, like always. Like Vi’s hands were made just for this, instead of for punching people’s lights out. How did Vi get so fucking lucky? To have Cait’s huffy breath in her hair and Cait’s nipples rising under her thumbs? “Violet.”
“Caitlyn.” Her skin is so mesmerizing. Vi will never get enough of it.
“I have to get in the shower.”
“Cancel your office hours.”
“The final is in two days, they’ll have a million last-minute questions.”
“If they can’t pass after a semester learning from the best detective in Piltover, a few more hours isn’t gonna save them.” Determined, Vi buries her face in Cait’s cleavage like she’s trying to drown.
Cait pets her head, scritching along the shaved side with her fingertips. “If you send that tube for me, you could join me in the shower after.”
“For funny business?” Vi asks hopefully, muffled, and Cait’s laugh rumbles through her sinuses.
“If we’re quick about it. And then maybe you’ll take a nap? You didn’t sleep well.”
“Nah, I gotta go by the market and then the bar, the new oven’s going in today, and then I told your dad I’d help with lunch at the clinic, and then I’m gonna go ask Ekko—you know.”
“My busy love.” At last Cait pulls back enough to nudge Vi’s face up out of her chest, stroking a thumb over her cheek. “Shall I meet you at the clinic, and we could go to Ekko’s together after?”
Vi kisses her thumb when it comes near enough. “Sounds like a plan.”
Then Caitlyn grins, and taps Vi lightly on the nose. “Excellent. Now I’m going to shower. Really.”
“I’ll send that message. Everything on Nero Eso.”
“Thank you so much, darling.” To Vi’s dismay, Cait draws away, pulling her top off as she goes; the glimpse of her bare back disappearing down the hall sends Vi scrambling for a notepad and a pneumatube.
Then Cait’s face appears in the doorway again. “And the file on Chross, if you would.”
“File on Chross. Got it.”
“Don’t lock yourself out again going down to the mailroom.”
“I won’t.” Distractedly Vi re-buttons her pajama top, probably misaligned, who cares.
The look Caitlyn gives her is distinctly bedroomy. “See you soon.”
Vi grins and leaps from her chair to grab her keys. “Don’t worry sweet thing, I’m wriggling.”
Cait’s guffaw chases her all the way out the door.
***
Exactly forty-seven minutes later they part ways with a kiss at the front door of their building, Cait headed uptown to the station and the Enforcer training facility, Vi headed downtown to the market near the bridge and then just down to the Powder Keg. The bridge market isn’t as extensive as the one by Piltover’s seaport, but it’s on her way, and she’s getting to know the vendors there. Today she picks up a bag of long-grain rice from the old guy with the mustache, and a game hen, tidily cleaned and plucked, from the weird couple who include a name and obituary with each of their butchered birds. (Farewell to Nugget, ringleader of mischief, who loved popcorn and hated Poro the rooster.) Then an armful of greenhouse veg from Tabitha, who Cait said is sweet to them because she’s a tenant farmer on a parcel of Kiramman land in the countryside—but Vi is also almost positive Tabitha is flirting with her every time she comes by alone.
“I’m throwing an herb bundle in here for you,” Tabitha tells her now, packing Vi’s purchases into her knapsack. “Fresh cut this morning. Can’t have too many herbs.”
“Especially not for a new kitchen,” Vi agrees, trying to calibrate her smile somewhere between I’m happily engaged and I love free stuff.
“Oh, you’re cooking in your bar already?”
“Headed there now, the stove’s being installed and I want to test it out.”
“A milestone! You’ll need some of my new batch of hot sauce then,” Tabitha chirps, and winks.
Sufficiently burdened with ingredients, Vi makes her way across the bridge. Lights candles for her parents on the Zaun side; heads for the bathysphere, because her shoulder’s been hurting, and the groceries are enough to deal with. There’s a scruffy kid by the station hawking the Gazette—not for the first time, Vi wonders if Zaun ought to have its own paper—and he spots her looking, sizes her up with the sharp eye of a true hustler.
“‘Councilor Sevika Vows Aid!’” he calls, holding up a paper in her direction. “‘Zaun Movement Gaining Traction!’”
Vi wants to laugh—the Gazette never actually calls Sevika by her name, and they avoid calling the Undercity “Zaun” whenever possible—but a little joy bubbles up in her chest that after six months living in Piltover with Cait, and arriving here from the direction of the bridge, she still reads to this enterprising kid as a Zaunite.
She worries about it, sometimes.
So she tosses the kid a few coins and shoves the paper under her arm on her way to the ticket booth.
It’s just her, a couple of yawning workers coming off night shifts, and some elderly folks riding down at this time of the morning, and none of them give her a second look. That’s good. That’s mostly how she likes it, and she lets her mind drift to what needs doing today, and this week, and this month, at the Powder Keg.
It’s tantalizingly close to being ready. The structure itself is finished, three floors and a basement, just like the Drop had. The architectural plans detail an office for Vi upstairs, and a little apartment for Thieram, who broke up with his boyfriend after Silco went down and has been crashing with some other semi-reformed goon. The second floor, which was just balcony seating in the Drop, has been expanded to include a modest community multifunction room. And there’s the bar and seating areas on the ground floor of course, and the kitchen, pantry, and storage for drinking water kegs in the back. Beer keg storage and the microbrewery in the basement, where the temperature is the most stable year-round. Plumbing and ventilation and chem lines have all been laid; the flooring is in, and most of the walls are at least base painted, and an artist Ekko knows is piecing all the windows together from reclaimed scrap glass.
The place is coming together—but there’s always more to do. And if fifteen-year-old Vi could see how excited grown-up Vi is about a cast iron cook stove with double ovens, six hot plates, and a two-foot-square griddle…well, she’d probably get it. Some days it was hell cooking for five-to-seven people on the tiny coal-burning thing they had back then. Vander always wanted to have a real menu for customers, more than just peanuts and dried cavernberries in bowls on the bar, but there was never money or help or time. Vi used to think that maybe when she was grown enough, had done enough jobs and saved enough cash, she could help him make it happen.
The old stove fell through to the basement, when the building burned; Thieram’s been refurbishing it for his apartment. Vi’s new stove will be cleaner, chempowered—with two separate thermostats!—and it’s the only thing she caved and dipped into Cait’s money for. Not House Kiramman’s calculatedly modest equity investment, but Cait’s actual personal money.
Cait keeps insisting that once they’re married, it will also be Vi’s actual personal money, and so she’s welcome to spend it as she likes. But it’s more than Vi would know how to spend in a lifetime of trying, and that still feels kind of despicable to her, so for the most part she’s pointedly ignored it. It’s one thing to spend Cait’s money on supplying the Firelights’ social programs and fixing some of the things that are so broken in Zaun, things Piltover broke; it’s another to start pouring it into the deep pit of personal deprivation that has always cracked right down the middle of Vi, since the day she was born in the shack under the Sump’s long-empty water tower. Who would Vi even be, if that pit were filled?
Her stove, though. It’s a thing of such beauty that she can’t feel the slightest bit ashamed. It takes four straining delivery people to finagle the black-polished body of it down the alley and through the back door into the kitchen, with two more trailing behind carrying the detached backsplash and warming cabinet. Within a few hours it’s assembled and in place, hooked up to the chem lines, heated and tested and calibrated. It warms the whole kitchen; she’s sweating by the time the delivery crew leaves, has to prop the alley door open for some air, but she puts the percolator on for coffee anyway. Just for the joy of the bubbling; for the pleasure of making one simple thing with her new baby.
“You’re doing amazing,” Vi tells the stove, watching with hands on hips. “Now let’s try lunch, huh? Just you and me.”
While the coffee brews, she sets out what she needs. A pot: cast iron with red enamel, donated by Thieram, who stole it from his ex when they broke up even though Thieram hates to cook. The knives: a gift from Jericho, and a block to keep them in, just because she’d asked him where to buy some and what to look for. A pitcher of water: from the water keg, because this deep in the Lanes you can’t always count on the stuff in the pipes being potable. The food she bought, and sauces and salt from the pantry, and a cutting board, and a heavy wooden spoon. The Gazette, spread out on the counter to wrap her scraps in for the Firelights’ compost collection. She’ll need a bin for that in the future, probably. If all goes well, she’ll have a lot of scraps.
By the time the coffee’s ready, she’s salted the chicken inside and out (“Pardon me, Nugget,” she mutters with her hand up the bird’s posterior, feeling up the giblets) and got it in the pot, covered in water. Pot goes on the stove to simmer—percolator comes off the stove to pour, but the coffee’s too hot to drink just yet so Vi starts chopping the celery.
She nearly chops her finger when a crash in the alley makes her jump. Frantic scrabbling and more clanging follows, skittery—the telltale sounds of animals digging in the trash. She hasn’t even opened the place yet, if she already has rats—
But when she pokes her head out the door to catch a glimpse, it’s not rats. Whatever’s digging in the toppled trash can is too big to be a rat, or a crow, or even a cat or a mongoose. Skinny legs stick out the open mouth of the can, maybe white or gray under layers of dirt, and a skinny tail with a brown patch at the base. As it backs out with some half-rotted treasure in its jaws, Vi can see it’s a dog. Spindly, spotted black along the belly and patched with brown along the back. A brown head and big brown ears that stick out like a Chirean, and a sharp brown face with dirty white around the mouth and nose like it’s been snuffling in flour. And it doesn’t see Vi in the doorway watching, because on the side facing her, its eye is gone.
Vi ducks back inside.
She thinks, chewing her lip, of the painting on the wall of their home office of two plump little puppies. Of the family portrait by the grand staircase in Kiramman Manor, with the two attentive hunting dogs. Of the kennel Cait has told her about at the Kiramman country house, a note of longing in her voice.
It only takes a few seconds of standing there to entertain and reject several fantasies of bringing this filthy, feral stray in the alley home to her one-eyed, dog-loving fiancée. At best, Cait would chew her out for taking risks and potentially giving them both fleas. At worst, the dog would chew on her literally, and she’d have to explain the whole stupid fantasy to Tobias at the clinic instead of finishing making lunch.
But—lunch! That, at least, is something she can do.
She scrambles for another pot, and a little more water. With a long fork and a sharp knife and a lot of cursing when she’s splashed with boiling water, she severs a leg from the hen in the big pot and drops it in the new pot. Some carrots, roughly chopped, dogs can eat those, right? Some of the rice too. Simple stuff. She can’t know how long this poor buddy’s gone without a meal, doesn’t want to do more harm than good.
It’s silly to stand there and watch it all boil, so she chops the rest of the carrots and the onions and the celery and throws them in her soup, the one for the humans; tears up herbs, smashes garlic, dollops in dark soy and Tabitha’s bright orange hot sauce. Paces to the doorway as everything simmers, and spies the dog curled up and chewing on something unidentifiable. Paces back to the stove, but she’s got a while yet before the leg for the dog is cooked through, so she forces herself to sit down with her forgotten coffee and look at the paper.
Undercity Councilor Draining Coffers for South Side Improvements Despite Separatist Threats, reads the headline that the newsboy spun for her. Typical fucking Gazette. She pulls out the page with the comic strips, and tosses the rest aside.
***
It’s been a long year-and-some since the battle at the Hexgates. Vi’s life now looks nothing like she could have imagined then; she had no concept of stability, or a future that could get better instead of just grinding her down and down into dust. Except for Cait—she definitely imagined Cait in her future, imagined loving her forever, in any way she could.
She never once imagined a dog, though. Vi thinks of herself as an animal person, somewhat aspirationally—the closest she’s ever come to a pet were the mice in her shithole apartment, scuttling around the edges of the room and clinking precarious empty bottles into each other when she startled them. She felt a kinship with those hungry mice; she’s always felt it with strays hunting for scraps and snapping at anyone coming too close.
Her chest pangs with the same understanding now, as she dishes the chicken leg and rice and carrots from her second pot onto a plate. The chicken, tender, sloughs right off the bone; the carrots are soft; the rice puffy and moist. Perfect. She takes the plate, and peeks out the door.
The dog is still sprawled in the alley, closer than before—drawn by the smell of food, maybe—with skinny legs stuck out and sides heaving with panting in spite of the chilly weather. The ladder of its ribs is painfully visible. But it clocks her presence almost immediately and scrambles up with head low and tail tucked, vibrating with tension and sniffing at the air.
“Easy there,” Vi murmurs. Now she can see that the dog has a white patch right in the middle of its forehead, and another like an eyebrow over the remaining dark eye that gives it a quizzical, skeptical expression. As dirty and starved-looking as the poor thing is, it’s undeniably cute.
“I made you some lunch. I was making soup, when you showed up. My fiancée, she doesn’t always eat great, and neither does her dad, I cook for them a lot. So I brought you some soup bits, just easy stuff, I know how it is when you’ve been hungry so long your stomach goes weird. I’m just gonna put it down right here, and then I’m gonna close this door, so you don’t get spooked while I’m finishing up. Okay? You take your time.”
Through this monologue the dog’s eye never leaves the plate in her hands; it licks its lips, tense and still as Vi deposits the plate and steps back inside, closing the door gently behind her. She should’ve put a window in this damn door—why didn’t she? Or even a peephole? For a frozen few moments she stands there listening, berating her past self and resisting the powerful urge to look out again.
Eventually though, Vi masters herself with a deep sigh, and returns to the stove. She still has humans to feed.
When she’s packed the finished soup into jars, and wrapped them in newspaper pages and her red jacket to keep them safe in her knapsack—and washed and dried all the dishes, and cleaned the counter, and turned off the stove—Vi gingerly opens the back door again. The dog is gone—but the plate is licked clean.
***
The cafeteria at the clinic is more industrial than the kitchen at the Powder Keg—inevitable, to some degree—but the Piltovan dietitians and the Zaunite chef Tobias hired have settled into an uneasy collaboration, and at every mealtime the kitchen churns out comfort food in astounding quantities. What was meant to be a perk for patients expanded quickly to include their families, and their friends, and then anyone in the neighborhood, and then just anyone. “Feeding people is healthcare,” Tobias pointed out, when Vi worried about scaring off the stuck up Piltie donors who helped fund the place. Then he’d winked at her. “And they don’t have to know the details.”
Tobias is pretty all right, in Vi’s book.
So when she’s not checking tasks off her list at the PK, she likes to pitch in with whatever the clinic needs. It’s usually grunt work—helping the cleaners with the endless linens when they’re shorthanded, or collecting full sharps containers for disposal uptown, or mopping the lobby when it’s full of mucky bootprints. Today it’s dishing out golden brown fish cakes for lunch; they come with a creamy, kicky sauce, and roasted vegetables that smell herby and delicious. There are even other lines with other meal options—as if anyone in Zaun would turn down free food no matter what it was—but Vi’s stationed at the fish cakes. They’re a little smaller than Vi might make them, and baked where she might do them on the griddle, but the sauce is very Zaun and she spends a lot of the lunch rush winking and spooning out extra.
“Three of those cakes for me, baby,” says Miguel, who works the door at Babette’s. His eye is puffed up purple, fresh stitches over his brow. “It was rowdy last night.”
Vi obliges. “Everybody okay?”
“What do you take me for?” Miguel scoffs, and Vi grins. Before Vi went to Stillwater, Miguel was just one of the girls, same as Babette, at a place on the North Fissure’s main drag; sometimes if Vi stopped by when it was slow they’d give her money and send her out for food or smokes, and then sneak her inside to the little break room where everybody hung out between clients. It was nice, once in a while, to have a place to go where her siblings would never think to look for her. Where the girls fussed over her, cleaning her bloody knuckles and calling her handsome.
Miguel seems to be enjoying the bouncer life now though—he’s bulked up since those days, and he was pretty big then too. She ought to ask about his workout routine.
“Getting low on fish cakes,” she calls over her shoulder instead, in the general direction of the runners who keep the trays filled, and dishes out extra of everything for Miguel. Behind her the call of “fish cakes!” get echoed back to the kitchen; less than a minute later, a figure with a tray appears in her peripheral.
“Somebody said you needed a top up,” says a warm, beloved voice, and the figure bumps her lightly at the hip and shoulder. “Budge over.”
“Cait,” Vi grins, flushed with immediate joy, and tips her face to the sun of that smile; her perfect almost-wife kisses her cheek, right over the VI, and then leans in to refill the chafing dish.
“How was the stove installation?”
“Perfect. I can’t wait to show it to you. I made us soup.”
Caitlyn taps the crumbs off her tongs and straightens. “We’re allowed to eat the cafeteria food too, you know.”
“I know, but I had to test the stove anyway.” She serves out two fish cakes to the next person in line, a lanky teenage girl with a sullen expression and one arm in a sling. “Veggies?”
“I guess,” the girl grumbles. Is this what Jinx was like, in the adolescence Vi mostly missed? Vi gives her an extra-heaping spoonful.
Beside her, Cait is radiating affection and restless, meddling energy. “That’s almost all carrots.”
“Carrots are good for seeing in the dark down here. You should eat more carrots.”
“That’s a myth. Give me the spoon, I’ll do the vegetables.”
“Okay, pushy.”
The girl groans, disgusted, and slumps away; an elderly woman in an enormous hat comes after her, and Cait picks out what she clearly feels is a mathematically perfect assortment of veg at a speed that’s actually astonishing. If Vi gets a little distracted watching Cait’s gorgeous long-fingered hands on the spoon handle, well, she can hardly be blamed. She’s only human, and she’s horrifically in love.
***
When the lunch rush has eased, they take three bowls and spoons and Vi’s knapsack across the lobby to Tobias’ office. Vi lets Caitlyn lead the way with her long stride, just to watch her; she must’ve stopped home before coming down, because she’s changed from her habitual uniform to one of her Vi-approved Zaun outfits. Faded brown pants with a floppy fold-over waist, loose through the thigh and then cinched at different heights on her calves; a fitted sweater that was clearly once two different smaller sweaters, in two different shades of yellow-green, and a pale blue high-necked shirt peeking up from under it with silver snaps all the way up the side of the neck. Tall gray woolen socks, and Vi’s red pitfighting boots, and her cane hanging off her belt like a sword. Even dressed down, she looks so gorgeous she makes Vi feel scummy in her baggy cream shirt that’s starting to yellow under the arms and her barrel pants with three mismatched patches across two knees. She fixes the messy tuck of her shirt, coming loose on one side; adjusts her belt a little, thinking of how Cait sometimes likes to hold her by it; shakes the long tail of her hair out of the knot she swept it into when she got too hot hours ago.
Caitlyn, who never misses a trick, looks Vi up and down as she holds open the office door and smirks. “Vi made us lunch,” she greets her father, and ushers Vi inside with a barely-discreet ass grab.
If Tobias notices, then he at least pretends blissful ignorance. “You didn’t need to do that, sweetheart.”
“She did,” Caitlyn argues. “The new stove was just installed.”
“Oh, marvelous! A momentous occasion.”
Vi, the tips of her ears starting to burn for multiple reasons, just shrugs her knapsack onto the little round meeting table in the corner. “I asked Chef to keep it hot over lunch,” she says, pulling out each jar, wrapped up again in newspaper pages.
Cait sets out the bowls and spoons; Tobias gets up from his chair to switch on the kettle for tea, and smooths out the paper page by page as Vi dishes out a portion for each of them. “A double treat! I left my paper on the sideboard this morning, just completely forgot about it. Did you see this ridiculous headline? What ever happened to unbiased journalism?”
“A myth,” Caitlyn drawls.
“Like the thing about carrots.” That earns Vi a laugh from Cait, and a raised eyebrow from Tobias. “The Gazette’s always hated Zaun, they’re just getting more obvious about it now that they have to cover Sevika.”
“Well, at least they’re talking about her.” Absently he takes a spoonful of soup and hums appreciatively; Cait puffs a laugh and takes a spoonful of her own.
“This smells lovely, Vi. Neighborhood soup?”
“Well, I bought everything specifically for it at the market on my way down, so…the opposite, I guess.”
Cait grins at her. “Purposeful soup.”
“Family soup,” Tobias declares, and then to spare Vi the embarrassment of getting weepy about it, he folds over the front page. “This is more like it: Piltover’s New Council: Their First Year in Office. Would you girls care to guess the highlights?”
He loves to make everything into a little game, Vi has noticed; she can easily imagine a tiny Cait cutting her teeth on these everyday challenges, honing her mind into the blade it is now.
“Certainly Hoskel and Salo’s relief fund for merchants, and reestablishing the pre-Hexgate trade routes,” Cait says now.
Vi snorts, eating her own soup with more gusto. “Bet they paid their own Houses out of those relief funds too.”
“Oh, certainly. Economy and self-interest always come first with them, they’re just as vile as the previous two.”
Tobias just grins. “You’re right on the money, Caitydid.” Then he looks expectantly at Vi.
She mulls it over through another spoonful of soup. Then, hopefully: “Steb’s Enforcer reforms? And cleaning up Stillwater, maybe? But they’ll say it was Bolbok, even though all she does is meddle and try to find a loophole to make the Sheriff a Council-appointed position again.”
“Good fucking luck,” Cait mutters. “Even Mel agreed my paperwork was airtight.”
Tobias chuckles. “Right again. What about Councilor Arvino?”
“Wretched old biddy,” declares Cait, faintly flushed now from injustice and the spice and heat of the soup. “They’ll be on about her Hextech task force keeping us safe from Jayce and Viktor’s evil inventions.”
This is a topic Vi hasn’t pressed on, and doesn’t now—she can admit she misses the gauntlets, but from where she sits Hextech really only ever made Piltover richer, and also fucked up her whole life. But she does think Jayce meant well, and if that’s how Cait wants to remember her brother then Vi can keep her mouth shut about it.
“She never put much stock in technological progress, did she,” Tobias muses. “Not like your mother. The Arvinos are very old money, I’m certain they’ve weathered the loss of Hextech better than anyone.”
Old money coming from a Kiramman is disquietingly unfathomable to Vi, who can barely imagine money older than the founding family she’s legally joining. She slurps her soup. “What do they say about Sevika? And Shoola? They partnered on a lot of stuff. Do they mention the business loan program?”
“They do,” Tobias confirms. “And the orphans relief fund for the new group homes, and the Academy funding for alternative energy development.”
“I guess Topside’s not going to be investing heavily in Zaun’s chem production,” Vi jokes, and Cait snorts.
Tobias tuts. “The color’s awfully bright, my dear. Perhaps they’ll delve deeper into electrical infrastructure.” Then he glances at Caitlyn. “That leaves Councilor Ferros.”
“Ugh,” Cait groans. “That arsehole. Every time I think an agreement has been reached about the building, he slightly alters the terms or he suddenly can’t be found for a signature for weeks. If he thinks I’m going to give up, he’s more of an idiot than previously estimated.”
“Now Caitlyn, just because you’ve fallen in love with this apartment—”
“It’s perfect,” Cait cries, “and he’s not doing anything with it except charging his tenants exorbitant amounts of money.”
This is another one that Vi stays out of. She’s a hundred percent on Cait’s side in spite of the incredible indulgence of buying a whole building just so they can have a second apartment—she’s gotten attached to the gorgeous stained glass window—but this has been an ongoing debate between father and daughter for months.
“I’m not saying it’s good landlord practice, but profit is enough of a reason to not want to sell.”
“Then he would have refused when I first asked. He’s got something shady going on that he doesn’t want me to look into,” Cait insists, “and I’m going to find out what it is.”
“Oh, did you get the files you needed this morning?” Vi asks.
Her distraction tactic works; Cait’s hand finds her thigh and squeezes it lightly under the table. “I did, thank you for that, love. I dropped them off at home on my way. Perhaps I should start requesting House Ferros’ public business records next.”
Maybe it didn’t entirely work. “So what does the paper think he’s been doing, above board?”
Tobias leaps on the question. “Ah, let’s see. Repair and beautification of the seaport district, and fortification of the coastal walls.”
“Of course,” Cait grouses. “He has quarries and gemstone mining operations all over Valoran, and in Shurima. He’s probably paying himself handsomely for all that stone.”
It’s time for Vi to pull out the big guns; she leans in, shoulder pressing to Cait’s to warn her, and drops a kiss at the corner of her prosthetic eye. “Cupcake.”
She scowls harder, but leans into Vi’s touch. “Mm.”
“Do you like the soup?”
“Oh,” Cait gasps, as though she’s been derelict in some important duty. “I’m sorry, I got so distracted. I love it, it’s very warming. It could be a little spicier, if you make it again at home. But it’s delicious.”
“Eat some more then, huh?” Vi suggests, and Cait glances down at her bowl, still mostly full.
“Ah. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing.” But she gulps another spoonful.
Across the table, Tobias’s grin could probably be seen from Freljord.
***
“You know Vi, one of my patients this morning was asking about the Powder Keg.”
“Oh yeah?”
They’re packing up the leftover soup to bring to Ekko—Vi probably made too much, but it’s good practice for feeding a bar full of customers—and Tobias is stacking the bowls and spoons to return to the cafeteria.
“Yes, an elderly gentleman in a wheelchair, said his name was Milton. He’d passed by on his way in, and wondered when it would open. Then of course when I told him my daughter-in-law was the owner, he had a hundred and one questions. Remembered you as a girl, it turns out.”
“Most people around the Lanes do,” Vi admits, a fuzz of warmth erupting in her chest at daughter-in-law.
“Well, he said he was glad to see Vander’s legacy carried on.” Then his proud beaming turns a little perplexed. “And he wondered if you’d be taking up monthly collections. I wasn’t quite clear on what he meant by that, but we got onto other topics before I could ask.”
“Oh. No, I…” She chews her lip, arranging the soup jars in her knapsack more fussily than they probably need, trying to figure out how to explain. Still nervous that Tobias may yet decide Vi and her family history are too seedy to yoke to the Kiramman name, though he hasn’t given her any recent reason to doubt him, and it’s not his decision anyway. Then Cait’s fingers find the small of her back, just the lightest touch. Unremarkable, except Cait’s touch can never be unremarkable to Vi.
“Before I was born, all the smuggling in the Undercity passed through the Lanes,” Vi starts. “That’s how Vander made the money to build the bar in the first place. He wasn’t directly involved anymore by the time Pow and I moved in, but he…created the opportunities. The space. People paid him for protection from gangs too, or sold information through the bar and gave him a cut. Ekko would probably know more, Benzo kept the account books.” She scrubs a hand restlessly through her side shave. “But the PK is just a bar. That’s about all the business I can handle.”
She’s still looking down at the jars when Cait’s full palm presses warm against her back, and Tobias hums his thoughtful, about-to-drop-wisdom hum. It reminds Vi of Vander. Of all the times he tried to get through to her, to teach her how to be a person, and not just an angry kid.
“Vi,” says Tobias, and when she drags her eyes up, he and Cait are both looking at her with matching gentle expressions. “A good father looks after his children any way he can.”
She swallows around a smile. “Yeah.”
***
Vi and Caitlyn find Ekko in his workshop, blasting some kind of metal frame with a welding torch as Scar and Jade look on from a calculated distance. Jade, with Scar’s too-big Firelight mask over her face, squirms on his knee and whines in a way that sounds seconds shy of complete meltdown.
“What’s all this, then?” Cait asks, always bolder than Vi in their joint grudging truce with Scar.
His knee jogs, tossing Jade up and down like a wagon over cobblestones. “My sister is too ferocious for her bouncing seat,” he explains, with a sneering aspect but obvious pride.
“Just gimme a minute,” Ekko calls as sparks flare up under his torch again.
“Whot’s oll this then,” says Vi, and Caitlyn kicks her ankle.
“Shut up.”
Vi leans around Cait to address Scar herself, swinging her knapsack to the floor. “You want some chicken soup? Just made it this afternoon. She eats solids now, right?”
“Soup isn’t a solid,” Cait argues as Vi pulls out a paper-wrapped jar.
“It has chunks.”
“She can have small chunks,” says Scar, still scowling as Jade winds up to a scream. “Thanks.”
Vi unwraps the jar and sets it by the stool Scar is propped on; holds out the paper to Jade, crinkling it demonstratively. “Hey kiddo, check this out! It makes noise. You can crunch it.”
Jade’s face is still hidden, but she sucks in a lungful of air and shrieks, snatching the paper in both little fists. The crinkling is barely audible over the steady pffffffff of Ekko’s torch, but she still squeezes experimentally, banging her fists together and then jerking them apart, tearing a hole in the middle of the page. This surprising outcome earns a happier shriek, and in short order Jade is shredding the paper into messy chunks and waving them in delight.
“Heck yeah, tell ‘em what we think of their Zaun coverage.”
“What’s with this confetti?” says Ekko, now scowling at Vi too as he pulls his gloves and heavy apron off.
Scar peers around him at the repaired bouncing seat, suspended from the spindly frame by a long spring. “Cost of doing business. Can I bring that back upstairs now?”
“Let the solder cool off for a few minutes.” Then Ekko turns to Vi and Cait. “Did I hear something about soup?”
“Yeah! You want some?”
“Neighborhood soup?” he says hopefully, accepting a jar.
Cait grins, leaning into Vi’s shoulder. “Family soup.”
Ekko’s lip curls faintly in the suspicious expression he wears whenever an inside joke between Vi and Cait might possibly be something salacious—though what could possibly be salacious about family soup, Vi doesn’t know.
“We’ve got one more jar,” she says, ignoring the you’re-a-gross-couple look. “You want to take two?”
“See if Raven wants one,” Scar suggests. “She’s got a cold. I swapped her off dinner prep tonight so she wouldn’t spread it around.”
“You know where she is now?”
“Adding to the wall.”
Ekko sighs, and claps a hand to Vi’s shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go see the fam.”
***
The Firelights’ memorial wall has stayed mostly unchanged since the weeks after the war. There are still plenty of problems in Zaun, but the worst of the violence has eased for the moment—chembarons and their goons are laying low, Jinxers have faded back into their old lives, social services are starting to relieve a city that suffers like suffering’s its job. Everyone’s licking their wounds, holding their breath, waiting to see if things really can get better or if the other boot’s going to drop.
So it’s surprising to hear that another face is going up on the mural. “Who’d you lose?” Vi murmurs, as they wind down the stairs around the tree.
“Raven’s big sister,” Ekko explains. “She’s been away for years now. Got herself a Piltie patron to go to the Academy, and they made her cut contact.” He sighs. “It broke Raven up. But then money started showing up every month like clockwork, with Raven’s name on it. No note, just showed up with a different messenger every time. It stopped coming after the Council building—” he glances back at Cait, following behind them, and swallows whatever he was going to say. “We thought it might start up again when things calmed down, but it hasn’t. No money, no sign, no way to find her. She’s just gone.”
Vi reaches out to grip the back of Ekko’s neck, a comforting press, thinking of the little boy he was when she disappeared. How the not knowing can eat at you.
Behind them, Cait clears her throat. “Do you know what House sponsored her? I can try to find out what happened.”
Ekko glances back again. “I don’t, but Raven might. Thanks, Topside.”
And Caitlyn, Vi’s wonderful, self-flagellating fiancée gives her smallest it’s-the-least-i-can-do smile.
They find Raven on a scaffold beside the stairs, a spray can in each hand, adding swipes of highlight and shadow to a portrait just beneath the clock. The new girl on the wall has the same hair as Raven, a brown puff of a ponytail off the back of her head; almost the same face too, straight nose and pursed mouth and broad cheekbones, but the skin and eyes are a few shades lighter.
Ekko whaps Vi’s arm with a grabby hand, and she passes him the soup jar to offer. It’s a good call; Raven has always been standoffish with Vi. Now she has some idea why—big sisters make hard and wrong choices all the time in Zaun, it’s no extra skin off Vi’s nose to take a little heat on this one’s behalf.
“Hey Ray,” Ekko calls, and stretches up to put the jar on the scaffold amidst the paint cans. “Chicken soup for you.”
“Scar ratted me out?” she asks, froggy and congested, adding a spot of pale warm brown to her painted sister’s cheek.
“Think I would’ve known anyway, you sound like shit.”
“Thanks.”
Ekko glances sideways at Vi. “Listen. Kiramman might be able to get some info about your sister.”
Raven pauses; turns, looking tired, eyeing the soup jar, then Ekko, then Vi, then Cait coming down behind them.
When she doesn’t reply, Ekko prods— “That something you’d want?”
Finally, she nods. “Yeah. It is.”
Then they all turn to Caitlyn, who’s standing frozen three steps behind them, staring at the painting like she’s seen a ghost. Her mouth works. “Is that Sky?”
Pain ripples across Raven’s face. “You knew her?”
“She was Jayce and Viktor’s assistant,” says Cait, still sounding astonished. Sorrowful, the way she always is when Jayce comes up. “She…she used to make me sandwiches. When I hung around the lab between classes.” Then Cait blinks, pulling back out of whatever memory was playing in her mind. “She did much more than that for Jayce and Viktor, of course.”
“Jayce…Talis? And Viktor, like…” Raven’s brows rise, her forehead furrowing.
Cait swallows. “Ah…yes. It was a good job. She—she seemed happy, to be working with someone else from Zaun.”
Vi can almost see “I’m sure she missed you” caught in Cait’s throat, wisely unvoiced.
“And she’s gone.”
“Yes. I’m sorry. I saw her name on the casualty list, after the Council bombing.”
“No statue of her though, huh?” says Raven, and turns back to the wall; swipes a shadow under the line of her sister’s jaw.
Cait swallows this shard of verbal glass like it’s her birthright. Maybe it is, in some ways—but Vi hates that, and mounts the steps between them to catch Cait’s hand. When she squeezes it, Cait squeezes back.
“She wore glasses.”
Raven turns again, sharp-eyed. “What kind of glasses?”
“Ah…for distance, I think.”
“Describe them, Topside,” says Raven, her scorn a little lessened by her stuffy nose; she crouches, hunting through her supplies for a scrap of paper and the stub of a pencil.
A slow breath eases out of Cait’s chest; she squeezes Vi’s hand again and then lets it go, shooing her off with a pointed look.
Vi can’t fucking wait to marry this woman.
“Come on, Little Man.” She slings her arm around Ekko’s shoulders. “I gotta talk to you in private.”
This wipes some of the perpetual weariness from his face; at once he’s ten years old again. “What did I do?”
***
“So what’s the matter?” Ekko says, tucking the two of them away on a quiet bench curved into the hollow of a disconnected pipe—though quiet is always relative, here. “Did you hear from—”
Vi cuts him off with a shake of her head. “No. We’re sending an invite to the post office the glitter bomb came from, and the Gazette will put something about Tobias’ party in the social column next week. If she wants to know, she’ll know.”
“And if she wants to come, she’ll come.” Ekko sighs. “Pain in the ass.”
“Listen.” Vi props her elbows on her knees, twisting her fingers together. “If she shows up here to see you, and she doesn’t want to see me…don’t feel like you have to tell me. Okay?”
“Vi—”
“I mean it.” She has a hangnail at the corner of one thumb; can’t help but pick at it. “She’s not a kid anymore. I have to trust her to know what she needs. And if she needs to stay away from me—”
“Then she’s being stupid,” Ekko interrupts. “It runs in the family.”
Vi huffs something close to a laugh.
Must not be close enough, because Ekko leans in, his voice softening. “Is this what you wanted to talk to me about?”
“No, no. It’s about the wedding.”
“I’ll be there with bluebirds on, you know that.”
“You’d better be,” Vi grins, and knocks his shoulder with hers. “We’re keeping the ceremony low key. But to be legal topside we have to have a license, and it has to be signed by two witnesses. People who can vouch for us. That we’re in it for real.” She glances over at him. “I’d like you to be mine.”
Ekko stares at her for a long moment; then he clunks his forehead to hers, eyes squeezing shut. “So are Enforcers gonna come after me if you ever break up with her?” he asks, to cover the wobble in his voice.
“Nah,” Vi assures him. “Maybe lawyers.”
When Ekko pulls back, he’s swiping at his eyes with the side of his fist as if that’s in any way subtle. “Okay. I can handle lawyers.”
***
Cait is sitting on the stairs looking up at the mural when Vi and Ekko get back.
Raven’s gone, and so’s the soup; on the wall, Sky’s glasses glint gold in the afternoon light. Vi kind of remembers her now—the mousy woman who’d found her and Cait, exhausted and bleeding and smelling like smoke from Jinx’s firelight bombs, resting on the floor outside Jayce’s lab in the early hours of the morning. Jayce hadn’t answered his door; Sky checked inside, and told them he hadn’t slept at the lab either. She was sweet about it. Concerned for Cait, but a thigh wound couldn’t sway Caitlyn Kiramman from her mission, and they set off limping again.
Now Sky was dead, like so many others, and Vi’s sister had probably killed her. Every time Vi thought she might have moved past it, that guilt would claw up her insides again. But it makes Cait sad when she wallows, so she tries to breathe through it, instead.
“Hey,” she calls, and Cait’s face when she turns is serene. Bright, when she spots them.
“Did you two have a productive conversation?”
Vi conjures a grin. “Yeah. He called me stupid and then he cried.”
“Shut up!”
Cait’s chuckle bubbles up like a fountain; carefully she makes her way down the steps and into Vi’s arms. “It’s all right,” she tells Ekko. “Vi cries at least once a day.”
“Come on, not anymore.”
“It’s very healthy,” says Cait, and kisses her cheek.
Ekko looks disgusted. “I was thinking it might be a good day to show you something we’ve been working on, but now I’m not so sure.”
Tucked into her side, Cait brightens even more. “Oh! Now? We’ve got the time, if you do.”
“You don’t think we should wait for—”
“It seems silly to put it off when it’s ready to go.”
“Okay, I hate this,” Vi interrupts, pointing between the two of them like she could circle their collusion in the air. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Ekko grins, rare and infectious. “Come on.”
They take a winding back route through the Lanes that feels familiar to Vi, but the memory is squirrelly; she’s found that her directional sense down here is still intact, but most of the specifics have been blurred by seven years of confinement and repeated blows to the head. When she was a kid she knew every alley, every ladder, every loose grate, as a matter of survival—back when surviving still sometimes meant escape. It’s a little baffling now, to recognize that doorway or this corner or know there’s a hidden shortcut here just as Ekko leads them into it, but to be unable to piece enough together in her mental map to know where they’re headed.
Until they step out into the crossroad between two cobbled arteries, and she sees the stained glass window of the arcade.
Vi freezes in her tracks. Is dimly aware of Ekko and Cait, of her own jaw dropping open. But there’s so much happening in her head and in her chest and in her gut, she can’t do anything but stare at the glass—whole, there, not shattered—and the darkened space beyond it, remembering, remembering, remembering. A place that used to feel safe. Theirs.
“Ekko and I are refurbishing the arcade,” she remembers Cait revealing, months ago, in the middle of a fight.
“I forgot,” she says to Caitlyn now, who squeezes her hand.
“I thought you might have,” Cait murmurs back, eyes flicking to Ekko. Then she smiles, the big kind that shows her tooth gap. “Surprise.”
Right—right.
Ekko is standing by the door, holding it open, watching them with excitement and some suspicion. “You coming?”
Vi nods, slowly approaching the threshold. Realizes she’s gripping Cait’s hand like a vise, tugging her along behind. The interior is full of dim shapes; very little sunlight makes it down here, even with the enormous window restored. But Ekko’s teeth are bright in the dark when he grins. He flips a lever on the wall, and chem gurgles through the pipes as all the lights come on.
It’s so bright. Clean. Chaotic—her eyes can’t settle, and her brain can’t take it all in. Changed, like she’s slid momentarily into an alternate universe, but somehow it’s also just the same. It feels the same. And on the wall behind the boxing machine—her boxing machine—is a painting of herself. The Vi of a lifetime ago, before her nose had been broken so many times. Hair slicked back, eyes fierce, gloved fists up.
Ekko’s hand grips her shoulder and gives her a fond little shake. “Happy birthday.”
She looks at him, his beaming face, and suddenly feels like she might explode right out of her skin. “Are you fucking kidding me?” she shouts, and pulls him in, and squeezes the life out of him.
“Are you surprised?” he laughs into her shoulder, giddy as a little boy, and she squeezes him tighter.
“So fucking surprised. I can’t believe you did all this. It’s not even my fucking birthday yet.”
“We’re only a week early,” Caitlyn points out, and then Vi has to let go of Ekko and wrap Cait in her arms instead. That mouth she loves to kiss curves against her ear. “Happy birthday, darling.”
“Cait,” is all she can manage, and it comes out wet-sounding. Tender hands nudge her face up out of hiding, curling around her jaw and thumbing the tears from her cheeks. Tender eyes, one piercing blue, one Vi’s namesake, find hers.
“I can’t wait to see you beat the absolute shit out of that machine,” says Vi’s almost-wife with poorly concealed heat, and Vi bursts into laughter.
“Try to keep it in your pants, Topside,” says Ekko, tugging at Vi’s elbow. “Come on, there’s gloves up on the platform.”
***
Either the boxing machine is faster than Vi remembers, or she’s gotten slower—it cracks her on the cheek when she obeys muscle memory that’s eight years and five inches out of date, and she cackles as blood coats her tongue and adrenaline floods her veins. But she’s stronger now than she used to be. Once she locks into that sweet peripheral awareness zone, she’s got it beat. Racking up points, working up a sweat, and at the buzzer she tops it off with a jab to the spinning plate at the center where Mylo’s face used to be. She’s a little glad it isn’t there now; she’s not sure she could still punch him, after everything.
The high scores spin, clacking, posting a gleaming new number at the top and knocking the rest—many ancient VIs, a single heartbreaking POW, and two CLAGs at the end—all down a line.
She swipes at her sweaty bangs. “I’m gonna end up pushing Claggor off the board,” she says, a bit mournfully; Ekko, leaning on the railing around the platform, just smiles.
“He wouldn’t care. He’d be impressed.”
“You think so?”
“No question, Vi.”
“I’m certainly impressed,” Cait adds, and Vi laughs around the fastenings of her gloves, pulling them open with her teeth.
“You see me work out all the time.”
“Mm, and it never gets old.”
Ekko groans. “Would you two please knock it off. Go shoot something.”
“Oh, yes, let’s!” Eager, Cait takes Vi by one burning arm and pulls her across the floor to the shooting gallery.
It’s the same setup as it always was—the clunky ball guns, and rows of targets on their tracks, the topless naga statues that used to make Vi feel squirmy if she looked at them too long. But the old targets are gone; in their place is the black and red of Noxian soldiers, and the purple and green of helmeted shimmerheads, and the gleaming white and silver of Hex puppets. Two no-points bystanders muddy the field, a Firelight in a fox-shaped mask and a miner in a hard hat and cast iron gauntlets. None of them look real—they’re all just as exaggerated as the old targets were—but the Hex puppets send a shiver down Vi’s spine anyway.
“See,” says Ekko, pointing at Vi, but glaring at Cait. “I told you it was too soon.” Then, to Vi again: “I wanted to make them all Enforcers.”
“And I didn’t want to encourage inter-city violence,” drawls Cait, a ball gun already in her hand. “These were the only enemies we could agree on.”
Vi snorts a laugh. “Peace really is possible.”
“The new scoreboard was her idea too,” Ekko acknowledges, pointing up; above the proscenium, new blank tiles hang, faintly swinging, waiting for the first round of play.
Cait grins. “I’ve been dying to get my name up there, Ekko wouldn’t let me test it.”
“It’s Vi’s birthday present.”
“Yeah, and Vi wants to watch the best shot in Piltover decimate these monsters,” says Vi, joining Cait at the counter and slinging an arm around her waist. “This is where you put your name in?”
“Yes, and we added a timer, you start it with this—”
Then she pushes the big round START button, and the whole length of the gallery lights up as the targets start to move.
In the first seconds, Vi’s attention is totally arrested by Caitlyn in her element: blind eye closed, steady hands on the gun, picking off high-point targets like it’s her job. Pistol-style’s not her usual, but clearly she’s trained with one before—she stands as naturally as Powder used to, with the same fierce focus and confident aim.
So, obviously, Vi’s watching her extremely attractive fiancée. Then she spares a look for the targets, eyes drawn by the spinning of each circle Cait hits. That’s when she finally notices that the walls inside the gallery are decorated with portraits, just like the one of herself behind the boxing machine.
Except these, one on each side, are both blue-haired. Bright, summer-sky blue: little Powder, loading a ball gun with a cocky smile. Rich, satiny navy blue: a much younger Caitlyn, taking aim, her tongue poking from the corner of her mouth.
By the time the buzzer sounds and the new high score board spins up CAIT 2250, Vi is squeezing the life out of Ekko again. “Are there more? I have to see all the paintings.”
“Yeah, I’ll give you the tour. Man, Topside wasn’t wrong about all the crying.”
Vi sniffs and pinches him hard under the arm through his jacket.
“Ow! What the hell, Vi!”
“I’m learning how to manage my feelings!”
Caitlyn, the traitor, laughs. But she catches Vi’s hand, and strokes the rough knuckles soothingly with her thumb. “And you’re doing so well, darling. Do you want a turn shooting? I’ll show you how.”
So they do. Vi kind of sucks at it, but that’s mostly because of Cait’s firm touch on her hips and her shoulders and her arms, adjusting her stance. Ekko does a bit better, but even the two of them shooting at the same time can’t come close to Cait’s score.
They’re more successful at a new game: rolling wooden balls up a long ramp with a sharp incline at the end, toward holes marked with different points. “Jump-ball,” says Cait, gesturing at the way the balls launch off the end. “It’s a Piltover game, Jayce and I used to play it at the Progress Day fair every year.”
A portrait of Mylo decorates the wall behind it, his wild hair and wilder eyebrows, grinning and juggling three of the wooden balls. Vi studies it, swallowing down the lump in her throat. “That’s exactly what he would do. Dumbass.”
“It used to piss Powder off so bad when he tried to juggle her inventions.”
“You remember that time—”
“I thought Vander was gonna strangle him!”
“So, he’s supposed to be washing glasses behind the bar,” Vi explains to Caitlyn, as Ekko throws his head back laughing.
“Don’t tell me he tried to juggle pint glasses,” Cait scoffs, her own grin wide.
Vi laughs. “Worse! He’d swiped some of the glitter bombs—”
“Wait, wait, you have to tell her about Sevika.”
“Sevika?” Cait’s eyebrows are so high now they might jump right off her face, and Vi has to pause to crack up about it.
“She was a regular at the bar, before she fucked off with Silco.” Vi leans in, conspiratorially. “Mylo had such a completely hopeless crush on her. He had a thing for older girls who looked like they could crush him flat.”
Cait stifles a giggle in her hand. “I can’t say I blame him.”
“Anyway, he was always trying to impress Sevika, and she never noticed, not even once.”
“Poor Mylo,” says Cait, looking up at the portrait with a silly grin.
Ekko sighs. “He was an idiot.”
“Yeah,” Vi agrees, and it feels warm in her chest—the memory of him, the adolescent goofiness he didn’t have time to age out of. She thinks of the drawing Ekko gave her, of the other world; of a Mylo who got to grow up. “So he’s behind the bar, ignoring all the glasses he’s supposed to wash, trying to juggle Powder’s glitter bombs.”
“Oh no,” says Cait, already sensing where the story is going, dropping her face into her hands.
“Yeah,” says Vi with relish. “He fucking set one off midair. There was glitter everywhere.”
Muffled, behind Cait’s fingers. “Oh nooo.”
“On every glass, even the clean ones, and on every person waiting at the bar, including Sevika.”
Cait barks out a laugh; beside them Ekko is wiping his face, crying with glee.
“You should’ve seen it, Topside. I thought for sure she was gonna bust a blood vessel trying not to knock his teeth in.”
“How old was he?”
Vi and Ekko look at each other, assessing. “What, thirteen?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
Cait sighs, face flushed with mirth. “Oh, what I’d give to have seen that. I wish I’d known you all then.”
“Yeah,” Vi agrees, taking one of Cait’s hands and swiftly kissing the knuckles. “But I’m glad you found me when you did.”
They get snacks from a vending machine marked FREE in huge letters—seaweed crackers for Ekko, dried squid for Vi, and cavernberry candies for Caitlyn—and Ekko shows Vi the portrait of Claggor on the machine’s side, flour-smeared apron on, a birthday cake full of candles in his hands. They tell more stories, sprawled across two couches arranged in front of the window. They try their luck with the old Mushroom Collector cabinet, its little purple Yordle running back and forth across the bottom of the screen. “Piltover doesn’t have anything like this,” Caitlyn gushes to Vi with quick motions of the joystick. “Honestly, I think House Kiramman should invest in chemtech.”
“You have no idea how many times we were here to clean or paint and I’d catch her goofing off on this thing.” The tinge of fondness in Ekko’s voice makes Vi grin and Caitlyn blush, even as she demolishes another high score.
Eventually they tackle another new game, Ekko puffing up with embarrassed pride when Vi proclaims the genius of it: two disc runners, just like the one he built from scrap to make deliveries for Benzo, suspended in a rack so they can spin and tilt in place. They face twin moving panoramas—Zaun scenery, painted on wide belts that spin upward through a frame. “The belt is connected to the throttle,” Ekko explains from his seat on one of the runners, “so the view goes by faster or slower depending on your speed.” He grins. “The more you punch it, the harder it is to keep balanced.”
“Pff.” Vi hops into the other runner. “How hard could it be?”
She eats his dust three races in a row, tilting wildly and definitely not shrieking at all, and is mocked mercilessly by both the real Ekko and the little Ekko at the painted finish line. Fed up, she pulls a laughing Caitlyn onto the running board behind her. “Best four out of seven.”
“Isn’t this cheating?” Cait giggles in her ear, bent low to fit under the arc of the disc. Warm arms wrap around Vi’s shoulders; Vi tips her head hopefully, and is rewarded with a kiss.
“It’s my birthday. Now help me keep this fucking thing going straight.”
Ekko cackles. “You suck at this. Those hoverboard lessons I gave you were a waste.”
“I could get you a bicycle,” says Cait into Vi’s hair as Vi revs the motor. “That might be more your speed.”
“I hate you both,” Vi declares, and slams the START button.
***
By the time it’s dark outside they’ve gone another round on every game, Ekko’s managed to break into the high scores on the boxing machine, and Cait has filled the shooting gallery board with her own name exclusively. Vi hasn’t cried again, though she comes close hugging Ekko goodbye.
“Thanks, Little Man,” she says into his hair. “I’m so fucking lucky to have you.”
“Back at you,” he tells her, hiding a sniffle in the collar of her jacket.
He and Cait bump fists—a new and adorable development in their relationship that thrills Vi to see—and he takes off back into the pipeworks, and they walk to the nearest elevator and then home across the bridge.
“You want to help me make dinner?” Vi asks as they cross into Piltover, her hand in Cait’s, their fingers tangled together.
“Of course.” Cait glances her way with a smile. “We have tomatoes about to go off that we should do something with.”
Vi hates it when food spoils before she can use it. Begrudgingly allows Cait, who is more sensitive to the freshness of food and doesn’t have a stomach hardened by desperation, to decide when something is “too disgusting to even consider eating, Vi.”
“Okay. I have bread dough in the icebox too…I think we have some cheese.”
“We have eggs,” Cait offers. “And one pepper left. And onions, probably.”
“I can work with that. No sweat.”
This earns her a quick kiss on the cheek as they stroll. “Your creativity is so admirable, love.”
Vi flushes. “It’s just what everybody does in the Sump.”
“But I’m sure not everybody does it as well as you. Genuinely, Vi.” Cait bumps their shoulders together, looking over at her. “It’s something I never needed to learn, but I wish I had.”
“You’re resourceful,” Vi assures her, “in your own way.”
Caitlyn receives this silently in a way Vi can tell is self-deprecating, but she lets it go. They’ve had such a good day, and she wants to hold onto it longer. So she just bumps Cait back, and then it becomes a contest to see who can bump the other more off-course, which Vi feels a little bad about when she knocks Cait shin-first into a fire hydrant neither of them saw on her blind side.
“Fuck, honey, I’m so sorry—”
But Cait just hisses and laughs, and sits perched on the stupid thing long enough to draw a guilty Vi between her knees and kiss her properly, right out in the middle of the sidewalk. “It’s all right. Not even the first thing I’ve stumbled into today.”
Vi examines her almost-wife’s perfect face, and finds it sincere; sweeps loose strands of hair out of her eyes with careful fingers. “We had fun today, huh?”
Caitlyn glows brighter than the street lights, brighter than the moon. “We did. I love seeing your world, Vi. Being a little part of it.”
“A pretty big part of it,” Vi corrects, and kisses her with a pleased sigh. This close, breathing together, she can hear the little whistle Cait gets in her throat when they’ve been in the fissures too long. They’re close to home now; Cait could take another shower while Vi starts dinner, the steam might help—
“Oh, they’re still open,” says Cait, kissing Vi’s chin and then pointing at a lit shop window up the street. “One of my students recommended this florist for the wedding, the owner is some distant cousin of hers.”
“You talked to your students about the wedding?” Vi asks, charmed.
Caitlyn’s grin goes shy, her hands finding Vi’s waist with a tender grip. “Well, I talked about my fiancée quite a lot.”
That makes Vi’s whole chest throb, and some other things too, and she has to kiss Cait a few more times. “I love you so much.”
Cait giggles against her mouth, breathy and girlish and pleased. The sort of softness that’s only for Vi. “I love you so much. And I would love to go home and show you. But would you mind if we peeked in the flower shop first?”
It’s extremely hard to pull away from Cait’s mouth, but Vi does vaguely recognize that a public indecency charge would put a dent in all of their future plans—including the wedding, for which she supposes they might like some flowers. “Wouldn’t mind at all, Cupcake,” she sighs as Cait grins at her knowingly.
“How’s my concealer?”
Vi studies Cait’s cheek in the glow of the street lamps. “You have the compact on you?”
Cait produces it from her pocket, and holds it out to Vi. It has a mirror—she could put it on herself. But she waits for Vi to take it, and tips her face up. Vi swallows, and gently dabs the edges where the bruise has started peeking through. “Okay. You’re good to go.”
The flower shop has the clean, regimented look a lot of Piltover storefronts seem to share. The bare metal frame of some kind of display is still standing outside, emptied for the night; the wide window is carefully arranged with a display of houseplants on ornate stands. The bell above the door chimes when they step inside, but there’s nobody else in the place that Vi can see—just cut flowers of shocking variety, lining the walls in gilded bins. She turns a slow circle to take in the gradient of colors, precisely arranged; the artful little table of vases and knick knacks and books; the counter at the back, surrounded by rolls of ribbon and paper. “It’s like standing inside a rainbow.”
“Beautiful,” Caitlyn agrees. “And it smells so good…”
Vi grins. “Like using all your hair goops at once.” But before Vi can think too hard about maybe running a floral-smelling bath after dinner, a door opens at the back of the shop and a gray-haired woman with a broom emerges, bringing with her a gush of frigid air. Is the whole back room here refrigerated? The idea is ludicrous—the glimpse Vi just got through the doorway suggested a workroom even larger than the front, and there’s no way a space that big could be kept so cold with just ice delivery, so it must be electrical. But the overhead cost! The thought sends a tingle of panic down her arms. Vi could barely justify the one-time purchase of a stove for her bar, and this woman can keep such a huge space cooled? How much does she charge for these flowers?
The florist in question startles when she notices them, clutching the broom handle to her chest; there’s a frozen moment, the sort Vi is far too familiar with, where she takes in their clothes and the Zaun muck dried on their boots and her whole body tightens. It’s fifty-fifty whether she’ll simply flee, or try to shoo them out like wayward strays, shouting for the nearest Enforcer patrol.
Cait, less accustomed to this reaction, unsheathes her polite society smile as if nothing is amiss. “I’m terribly sorry to stop in so late, but your shop came highly recommended, and we happened to be passing by.”
The florist blinks, and Vi can clock the moment she recognizes Caitlyn—they’ve yet to encounter a topsider who doesn’t—and her whole mien shifts into customer service mode with a speed that borders on pathological. “Lady Kiramman! My goodness, what a pleasure to have you in my little shop. Apologies, for a moment I didn’t recognize you.” She sets the broom aside, straightening her apron and beaming. “What can I do for you?”
“My fiancée and I are interested in flowers for our wedding,” says Cait, joy seeping through her polite detachment when she glances at Vi.
The florist looks at Vi too, just a reassessing flick of her eyes, before her full focus is back to Caitlyn. “Of course! Your engagement was all anyone could talk about when the news broke. Why don’t you tell me a bit about your plans.” She hustles to the counter for a notepad and pen.
Cait follows, unhurried; Vi hangs back, hands in pockets, awkwardly looking around at the flowers again. Just listening.
“…in the summer,” Cait is saying. “It’s a very small ceremony, just bouquets and boutonnieres, but we’ll want centerpieces for the reception.”
“Lovely. How many tables?”
“Ten round, and eight booths. And perhaps some kind of bunting? There’s a balcony.”
“And your colors?”
“House green, lavender, and aubergine. Secondary colors are dark pink and dark blue,” she adds before the florist can ask. All Vi’s suggestions, that Cait excitedly agreed to. She even pinned pages of Vi’s embarrassing notes, little fantasies from before they’d even proposed to each other, to her murder board along with all the business cards and color swatches and invitation lists.
“That will be just beautiful. And what’s the name of the venue?”
“The Powder Keg.”
The florist’s effusiveness cracks, just a little. Vi can see it from her vantage browsing one of the knick knack displays, but she doesn’t need to—it’s tangible in the air. Predictable, but Vi’s heart still sinks in spite of herself.
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s in Zaun,” Caitlyn offers, in the same even, happy tone as the rest of the details. “In the North fissure.”
“I see.” A strained smile from the florist. Vi looks away; it reminds her, suddenly, of Caitlyn’s mother eyeing her from the other side of a rifle.
Desperate to occupy herself and equally desperate to avoid getting pulled into this conversation, Vi picks up a book from the table instead. The Language and Sentiment of Flowers. It’s like a little dictionary, so she looks up her name and discovers there are more types of violets than she realized: blue for faithfulness; wild for love in idleness; sweet for modesty; Ionian for watchfulness.
“No,” Cait is saying, “but I’m very partial to violets.”
When Vi startles up from the book, Cait is looking at her again with a gooey expression. She asked ages ago if Vi had a favorite flower, and got sad when Vi told her she’d really only seen flowers in pictures, and had no particular opinions on any of them. They spent a lot of time in the Manor garden after that, and Vi decided that every flower was kind of her favorite—all overwhelming in their delicacy, the softness of their petals and scents. Not much like Vi herself, even though life with Cait has made her softer. And probably better-smelling.
The florist doesn’t look at Vi at all this time, like she’s not even there. Instead, she turns to her notepad, scribbling out some math. “Then I’ll be happy to put together a few sample combinations for you to choose from.”
“That would be wonderful. Vivian—I believe she’s a cousin of yours? She said you have an excellent eye.”
“Oh, you know young Vivian! Of course, she’s in training to join your Enforcers.”
“They’re not mine anymore,” Cait corrects. “But yes, that’s how we know each other.”
The florist doesn’t seem to notice the faint cooling of Caitlyn’s tone. “Well, what you’re looking for would usually be in the five- to seven thousand hexes range.”
Vi flinches so viscerally that she fumbles the book, and it drops back onto the table with a clatter that draws both Cait and the florist’s eye. Vi hastily props the book back up where it was, trying to ignore the ice in her chest.
Five thousand gold hexes. On the low end. It’s barely a drop in the deep Kiramman bucket. It’s more money than Vi’s ever had, more than she’s even put into rebuilding the entire bar.
The florist clears her throat. “But I’d be delighted to offer a friends and family discount for you, Lady Kiramman.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Cait says, past the ringing in Vi’s ears. Suddenly Vi does not want to be here anymore; her skin is tight and buzzy, her hands clenching. Caitlyn is still talking. “Of course my fiancée and I need some time to discuss it together first, before we make any decisions.”
“Of course,” says the florist, in a tone that says really?
When Vi looks up, Cait’s sharp eye is on her. Reading her like a fucking book, and usually she likes feeling so exposed to Caitlyn, but—
The florist is looking at Vi too, like she smells something faintly bad and can’t figure out what to do about it.
“I’m gonna go on ahead,” Vi says, too loud in the closeness of the shop. “Get dinner started.”
Cait’s brows pull together. “All right,” she agrees. “I’ll be right behind you, Vi.”
Vi turns, and gets the fuck out of there.
***
The walk home is a blur; by the time the buzzy feeling eases, she’s diced the hell out of every vegetable they have. Her fingers all seem to be intact, so she slams a skillet onto the stove top like she can tamp herself back down into her own skin with it, splashes in some oil, and clicks the burner on. It’s gas, up here, and the whoomp of the flame catching is satisfying. Helps her focus.
She already got the dough out of the icebox—good job, fugue state Vi—so she hunts for the rolling pin and the flour and the dough cutter Cait got her when she was experimenting with rolls, and then she pulls out the spices she needs and lines them up on the counter, and by then the skillet is hot but she forgets and scalds her palm on the handle. “Dammit!”
“Vi?”
She didn’t even hear the door; Cait comes through from the hallway, cautious, and Vi hates that, almost as much as she hates the bruise hidden under careful makeup. She runs her hand under the cold tap, and tries to steady her breathing. “I’m okay.”
Caitlyn absorbs this. Then— “What can I do?”
“Stir these onions, in a second.”
“Okay.” Cait strips off her sweater and fetches the wooden spoon, and stands at the ready as Vi dumps the garlic and onions into the skillet.
Silence settles, heavy, but not cold. Their arms brush as Vi turns her attention to the dough, and even that accidental touch is grounding; some of the heat in her chest recedes, leaving behind a sticky, chilly shame.
She planned make bread boats to fill with the vegetable mixture, and bake them. Sprinkle in some cheese, crack an egg in each one. But Cait’s brought the scent of the flower shop back with her, and so Vi divides the dough in five, and rolls each piece out into a petal shape. Folds their edges in with slow, careful fingers, and this eases something in Vi’s body too. When they’re arranged just so on a tray, Vi feels in control again, and covers them for a second rise.
“The onions are getting brown,” Caitlyn reports from the stove.
“Throw the rest of that stuff in there now. Wait, let me do the spices.”
So they stand side by side, Cait close and flushed with the heat, Vi with flour on her pants where she wiped her hands in her haste. Some cumin. Oregano. Chili flakes, and Demacian paprika, and parsley. Salt and pepper, of course. None of it’s fresh, but dried does just as well.
“Keep stirring?” Cait confirms when Vi’s satisfied.
“Yeah. We want it kind of stew-y.”
And then Vi is just standing still, watching Cait watch the pan, and standing still has never been her strong suit. She washes some dishes. She preps the egg wash, and preheats the oven. She’s already got eggs and flour out, so she gets the sugar and the butter and mixes a fast cookie dough, pretending she doesn’t notice Cait watching her arms flex through her threadbare shirt as she stirs.
“Is this stew-y enough?”
“Yeah, that’s good. That’s great. Hold on, lemme—”
Egg wash goes on. Vegetable mix spooned in, and some cheese crumbled over. The tray goes in the oven, and their ticky kitchen timer is set for forty minutes, when Vi will crack an egg in the center of each petal and put them back in to poach.
For now, she slumps into a chair.
Caitlyn’s leaning against the counter, watching her, and that’s too far away. “C’mere.”
How a six-foot-tall woman can sit so lightly in her lap, Vi will never know, but she feels right there. Just like this morning. Close, her skin warm and sweet-smelling, her hands petting Vi’s hair.
“Darling—”
“I’m sorry.”
Cait’s thumbs stroke her temples. “No. She was awful to you. I’m sorry.”
Vi shakes her head; grips Cait’s hips, kneading her fingers into the flesh there in anxious rhythm. “I just—I don’t—”
Trim fingernails scritch along the back of her neck. Cait breathes slow, her chest rising and falling against Vi’s, unhurried. Waiting.
“I can’t—afford that. And don’t say we can, that it’s my money too, it’s—” Vi swallows hard and tips her forehead against Cait’s collarbone. “I don’t know what I’m bringing, here. To us. I don’t know what I’m…contributing, that can match what you’re giving me.”
Cait’s mouth falls on her hair, a fierce kiss. “Everything. Everything, Vi. You—you take care of me. Just today, you sent that message for me. You made me lunch. You made us dinner. You played games with me, you kissed me, you hold me—”
“I embarrassed you at the flower shop—”
“You didn’t—”
“You gave me a stove, you gave me that whole arcade, and I knocked you into a fucking fire hydrant. I bruised you. I woke you up screaming.”
“Vi. Vi, please can you look at me?”
That’s so hard to do. To see Cait’s face scrunched up in distress. But tender fingers cup her jaw, and hold her there. “You gave me your fear. Your trust. You let me hold you, and have you. All I did was spend some money. Even the arcade was mostly Ekko.” Caitlyn takes a deep, slow breath—Vi can hear the quiet whistle again—and Vi tries to mirror it. “I don’t know how else to tell you, how much the money doesn’t matter. Wait, that’s—it does matter, I know it matters, to people who don’t have enough. Of course it does. It would have mattered to you, it still matters to you, I can’t know what that’s like but I can try to understand. But…I have so much more of it than we need, and—”
She stops. Starts again. “If this is all too much—not us, but the wedding, the parties, the expense, the fucking faff—I would rescind every invitation tomorrow, and that would be okay.”
Vi’s chest constricts as her view blurs. “No, you can’t call it off, we have rules. We haven’t had dinner.”
“Oh, love,” Cait peppers kisses on her wet face. “I’m just trying to say—you are the most important to me. Don’t do anything that hurts you, just because that’s what’s done.”
“I should be part of your world too,” Vi tries to explain. “I want to make it so Piltover has to swallow me, even if they choke. But it’s hard. It’s like—I was born in the Sump, I’m used to the air. The water. It’s part of me. But you still get a little wheezy when we’re down there too long, and you get that rash behind your knees. It’s harder for you to be there.”
Caitlyn is quiet, listening with intense focus, her legs shifting—itchy right now, maybe, and just noticing it.
Vi strokes her sides, trying to steady them both. “But you were born here, and the money is the air, the water, the thing that’s not always good for you but it’s in you. And it makes me wheezy and itchy to have it. Sometimes I hate it, I hate that snotty florist and her five thousand hexes and her discount that’s only for people who can afford full price. It makes me feel like mud under a boot, and it makes me proud to be mud, and I—” Cait’s watery-eyed now too, watching her, perched warm and sad in Vi’s lap. So Vi tries to sort it all out, between her chest and her mouth, and find the right words. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t know who I am, when it’s too easy,” she whispers. “When I’m too safe. But how is Zaun ever gonna get out from under this place, if we only know who we are when they’re stepping on us?”
Cait absorbs this slowly, and Vi tracks it in her face. In the way her body shifts. Her awareness, reactivated, of all the disparity left to solve. Of her own weight on Vi, literally, right now; of the things she can’t help, and the things she still can’t forgive herself for. Vi watches her take this all into herself again, and add onto it Vi’s martyr complex—which isn’t what Vi wanted at all, but she doesn’t know how to stop it.
And then Caitlyn surprises her.
“That’s a lot of pressure to put on yourself,” she says, softly stroking the side of Vi’s neck. “On us. I—I feel it too. But sometimes I just want to be in love with you, and have you know it, and to hell with everything else.”
It’s Vi’s turn for a deep, cleansing breath. “I do know it. I’m so fucking in love with you too, Cait.”
Their kisses are softer now; plush, mouths and noses tender from crying, the touch of tongues like a peace offering.
When the timer buzzes, they both laugh, the heavy tension starting to dissipate. It’s always so hard to peel themselves apart.
***
Dinner, when it’s ready, is delicious.
“Wha i coh?” asks Cait, her mouth full.
“I dunno,” Vi admits. “I mean, Vander used to make it all the time in the summer, but he just called it tomato boats.”
Cait looks at the half-plucked flower shape on the tray, and back up at Vi with a questioning eyebrow.
“The flower was my idea.”
“Well,” Cait offers, finally swallowing, “tomato flower is a fine name. Descriptive.”
“Nah, it needs something.”
Lapsing into thought, Cait takes another bite of her petal and stares out the kitchen window into the dark. The wheezing has eased up now, but Vi will have to remember to get out the petroleum jelly later for the spots of scaly rash she’s sure have flared again on Cait’s knees.
“What if we put boxes on the balcony,” Cait says out of the blue, “and grew our own flowers in the spring? For our bouquets?”
Vi looks out the window too, though she can’t really see the balcony now, and then back at Caitlyn. “We can do that?”
“I don’t see why not. The gardeners at the Manor probably have all the materials we’d need, and they could give us some instruction. We could even grow vegetables, maybe, or herbs.”
Chewing, Vi considers this. Likes the sound of it. The visual. It’s—it’s still only possible here, with Piltie air, with sunlight, but it doesn’t make her heart shrink down like a raisin the way the flower shop did. “We’d have to do some research. Decide what to plant.”
“Ah, I—” Cait fishes in her back pocket, and withdraws a slender book. “I saw you looking at it.”
The Language and Sentiment of Flowers.
Vi takes it. Thumbs the cover, swallowing through a sudden resurgence of feeling. “It’s—this is great.”
Cait’s mouth tips up in a grin, hearing what Vi doesn’t say. “Don’t worry, I didn’t pay her for it.”
“What?” Vi stares at her almost-wife, all bright-eyed and pleased with herself. “Cupcake…did you steal this book?”
A bubbling laugh, and that cute tooth gap flashes. “I wish I was that smooth. No, after you left I laid it on thick that my fiancée is a wonderful artist, and in the end it would be her decision which florist we contract with, since she owns the reception venue. The book was free, with the florist’s compliments.”
“Silvertongue,” Vi says, flushing at wonderful artist. “But even if we know what to grow, we can’t grow enough to decorate the whole bar in boxes on our balcony.”
“No, you’re right. But I actually have a bit of a headache, from how strong the smell was in the shop,” Cait admits. “Maybe we don’t want to fill the bar with fresh flowers.”
“Oh,” Vi frowns, and reaches out to cup Cait’s face. “Why didn’t you say earlier? Do you want some ice?”
“I’m all right.” But Cait tips her face into Vi’s palm. “Maybe a cuddle, later.”
“You’re getting that whether you need it or not.”
Cait smiles, and kisses her palm before pulling away for another bite of her petal, so Vi goes back to eating too. Looks at the two petals left, debating whether she wants another.
“What if,” she says slowly, the idea forming as she speaks, “we made our own flowers? Fake ones?”
“That’s a lovely idea,” says Cait, brightening. “Silk, like we had for the send-off?”
“Or paper.” Vi chews her lip. Takes another petal and bites that instead. “It wouldn’t be too hard, if I make a pattern. We could do a few every day, and have enough for centerpieces by summer.”
“Would newspaper work? I’m sure my father would let us cut up his Gazettes when he’s done reading them.” Then Cait grimaces. “Though I suppose there are some headlines we wouldn’t want cropping up at a Zaun wedding reception.”
“We could paint them. That would make them a little sturdier, too.” Vi looks at Caitlyn. “Could we—we could buy some paint.”
A grin breaks over Cait’s face. “We absolutely could.”
“Green and lavender and eggplant?”
“Aubergine. And pink and blue.”
“Some really nice paint. Tomorrow. We’ll go find another snobby store, and I’ll wear my pants with all the rips, and we’ll make them take my money.”
Caitlyn’s ankle nudges hers under the table, conspiratorial. “I’d love nothing better.”
Later, they take a plate of cookies and Vi’s evening rye to the couch. Cait nudges Vi down and settles on top of her, tucked between her legs and under her chin, and lets Vi rub her scalp with gentle fingers.
“Stay in bed with me tonight,” she says, her voice stern, rumbling into Vi’s chest. “Please.”
“Okay.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise. You have to tell me about when you were suspended.”
“It’s not exciting. My mother never wanted me on the force. One little explosion and suddenly even guard duty in that stupid skirt wasn’t safe enough, and Marcus hated me, so he wasn’t hard to convince.”
“One little explosion?”
“All right, a large explosion.” Cait pats her reassuringly. “Doesn’t matter. I found you, and then Marcus was dead, so.”
Vi cranes her neck, trying to look down at her. “You were suspended when you broke me out? You didn’t tell me that!”
“I was trying to pretend pretty hard that I wasn’t.”
“You rebel,” Vi laughs, and tips her head back. They settle into easy quiet. Vi sips her drink; Cait eats bits of cookie. They breathe together until they’re one organism, sharing air, melded warmly together.
When they both start to doze off, Cait struggles to her feet and jostles Vi after her. Strips them both out of their clothes and shoves Vi’s pajamas at her. They brush their teeth together, bleary; they fall into bed, and Cait wraps herself around Vi’s back like a barnacle, and doesn’t let her go.