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The bed was cold. It was cold in the particular way that meant Vi had been gone long enough for the sheets to forget her shape.
Caitlyn woke slowly, surfacing through the soft haze of exhausted sleep, one hand reaching instinctively across the mattress before her eye had even opened. Her fingers skimmed wrinkled linen and lingering warmth long since surrendered to the chill of the Manor. Rain tapped gently against the tall bedroom windows. Somewhere deep in the house, something clattered.
Caitlyn stilled. The clock on the bedside table, the one with the golden-edged hands and glinting glass face, proclaimed it was around two in the morning. For a moment, she stayed exactly where she was, staring at the dark canopy overhead while the storm murmured beyond the glass. Kiramman Manor had always sounded different in the rain. Older somehow. The bones of the place creaked and sighed beneath the weather, wooden beams settling with low groans like a living thing turning in uneasy sleep.
Another thunk echoed faintly from downstairs, followed by a muffled curse.
Caitlyn blinked.
Vi.
She exhaled slowly through her nose.
Of course.
She pushed herself upright, rubbing the blur of sleep from her singular-seeing eye. The lamp beside the bed remained unlit. The room around her existed in shades of blue-gray shadow, the heavy curtains, abandoned books, Vi’s jacket hanging crookedly over the armchair in the corner.
The sight of it tugged painfully at her chest, not because anything was wrong, but because something might be. That was the horrible thing about grief. It never really left. It merely learned new disguises. Sometimes it arrived as silence. Sometimes as memory. Sometimes as the sudden terror of waking in the middle of the night and finding the person you loved gone from bed.
Caitlyn swung her legs over the side of the mattress and stood, tugging one of her robes tighter around herself against the cold. The marble floors bit at her bare feet as she crossed the room. The hallway beyond lay dim and cavernous, lit only by scattered wall sconces burning low amber in their brackets. Kiramman Manor was too large for two people. Caitlyn had known that long before they moved back into it. The place had been designed for galas and politicians and generations of powerful people lingered like ghosts in every corridor.
Now, it was just mostly quiet. Quiet in the way abandoned churches were quiet. Quiet in the way mausoleums were.
Caitlyn descended the staircase carefully, one hand trailing along the polished banister. The storm had deepened outside, rain now rattling sharp and silver against the windows lining the stairwell. Wind whispered beneath the doors somewhere in the lower halls. And, underneath it all, there were sounds, scrapes and scratches. Sharp clatters.
A muttered, “Oh, come on—”
Another sharp clatter.
Caitlyn’s mouth twitched despite herself.
The workshop sat at the far end of the Manor’s west wing, tucked behind what had once been one of her mother’s mechanical studios. The servants used to avoid this part of the house because Cassandra Kiramman had disliked interruptions while working.
Now, the old rooms belonged to Vi. Or rather, they had slowly become hers, not necessarily through declaration. Vi had never claimed space so directly. She inhabited rooms the way alley cats did—wary at first, all sharp shoulders and suspicion, until one day you realized she had left pieces of herself everywhere, like a jacket slung over a chair. Boots by the door. Half-eaten fruit abandoned beside stacks of papers. Fingerprints smudged across polished surfaces. Life, all messy and magnificent.
As Caitlyn turned the final corner, warm light spilled beneath the workshop door in a golden strip across the floorboards. And there it was again. That smell. It was sharp enough to cut through even the damp scent of rainwater and old wood.
Alcohol.
Caitlyn stopped walking. Her stomach tightened instantly. The scent wasn’t overpowering. Faint, if anything. But memory made it heavier. Memory sharpened it into something dangerous. (Amber turned a fierce, fiery shade in the flicker-flame. Glass bottles catching jaundiced light. Vi, laughing too loudly with bruised knuckles and blood drying beneath her nails. Vi, trying very hard not to feel anything at all.)
Caitlyn stared at the line of light beneath the door.
Inside, something hit the floor hard enough to make the walls tremble slightly.
Another clang. “Oh, you absolute bastard—”
The words dissolved into frustrated muttering. Caitlyn almost smiled. Almost. Instead, worry settled deeper beneath her ribs, familiar as an old wound.
Over the past few weeks, it had been small things.
Small enough that she had convinced herself not to mention them. Vi sleeping downstairs more often than upstairs. Fresh bandages wrapped around her hands every few days. Missed breakfasts. Missed dinners. A growing habit of disappearing into the workshop for hours at a time and always that smell lingering faintly on her clothes afterward.
Caitlyn rested her hand lightly against the door but didn’t knock. She didn’t enter. She told herself it was because she trusted Vi, which was true, but mostly it was because she was afraid. Afraid that if she opened the door, she would confirm the terrible little fear that had been growing quietly inside her for weeks.
Trauma made cowards of people. Or perhaps not cowards but observers. People who learned how to recognize disaster before it arrived.
After her mother died, Caitlyn had begun cataloguing grief everywhere without meaning to. In the exhausted faces of the Councilors and her fellow Enforcers. In trembling hands. In unopened curtains. In the hollow look people wore when they had survived something enormous and had not yet figured out what survival was supposed to look like afterward.
Vi had survived too much for one lifetime already.
The door rattled suddenly as something bumped against it from inside. Caitlyn stepped back instinctively. Silence followed.
Then Vi sighed heavily. “I hate this stupid thing.”
Something about the sheer sincerity in her voice made Caitlyn’s chest ache. She imagined Vi inside the workshop exactly as she had looked earlier that evening: sleeves rolled to the elbows, pink hair falling into tired eyes, grease streaked across her cheekbone. Beautiful in that careless, catastrophic way that still startled Caitlyn sometimes. Beautiful enough to terrify her.
Caitlyn lowered her gaze. At the base of the door sat an untouched dinner tray from hours earlier. The soup had gone cold, the bread and tea both untouched. Her throat tightened. Very quietly, so Vi wouldn’t hear, Caitlyn picked up the teapot from the tray and tested its weight. It was still warm. So Vi had at least reheated the water recently. That shouldn’t have comforted her as much as it did.
Carefully, she replaced the cold cup with a fresh one from the small cart left in the hallway by the kitchens earlier that night. She poured steaming tea with slow precision, listening all the while to the scrape of movement beyond the door.
For one fleeting moment, she considered entering anyway. She could say, come upstairs. You need sleep. You’re bleeding through your bandages again. Please talk to me.
Instead, she set the cup gently back onto the tray and walked away. The storm followed her through the Manor as she climbed the stairs again, all whispering wind and silver rain.
By morning, the tea was gone. Not the cup, but just the tea.
Caitlyn stood in the western hallway staring down at the tray balanced outside the workshop door, her fingers tightening slightly around the stack of papers tucked against her chest. The porcelain cup sat empty beside the untouched bowl of soup from the night before. A pale brown ring stained the bottom where the tea leaves had settled. It was cold now. Used. Proof of something small and stubbornly alive behind the closed door.
The workshop itself had gone quiet sometime around dawn. Caitlyn had heard it happen from bed upstairs, the gradual slowing of sounds until the Manor finally sank into silence. No more muttered swearing, no more scraping, and no more sharp clatter of tools hitting the floor. It was just the rainfall against the roof.
And then nothing.
Caitlyn should have slept afterward. Instead, she had spent hours staring at the ceiling while morning crept pale and pearled through the curtains. Now sunlight spilled weakly through the tall hallway windows, illuminating drifting dust motes and the faint trail of sawdust scattered across the floorboards outside the workshop.
Caitlyn’s gaze lingered there. Sawdust. There seemed to be more of it every day. Tiny golden flecks tracked through the Manor like breadcrumbs.
She crouched carefully, setting the papers beside her as she brushed two fingers lightly through the dust. It clung to her skin, soft as pollen.
Odd.
The old Kiramman mechanical studio had always smelled like oil and ozone and hot metal. Sharp things. Precise things. Now, the air carried cedar and smoke and something warmer beneath it. Something almost comforting.
Behind the workshop door, silence held steady. Caitlyn rose again slowly. She should leave it alone. That had become something of a mantra lately, a memory in her mind. Leave it alone. Leave her alone.
The line between care and control had grown perilously thin after the war. Caitlyn knew that. She knew what it meant to suffocate someone with concern until they felt watched instead of loved. Vi hated being watched. She hated being handled delicately even more. So Caitlyn had tried—truly tried—to give her space. But space was easier to offer in daylight. At two in the morning, with the smell of alcohol lingering beneath the door and nightmares clawing at her ribs, space felt unbearable.
A floorboard creaked somewhere overhead, footsteps following, heavy and familiar. Caitlyn looked up just as Vi appeared at the top of the staircase. Her hair was a disaster and not in the stylish, artfully disheveled way fashionable young people in Piltover sometimes attempted. Pink strands stuck out at impossible angles, flattened on one side and curling wildly on the other as though she had run both hands through it repeatedly and lost several arguments in the process. Which, knowing Vi, she probably had.
She wore one of Caitlyn’s old undershirts rolled at the sleeves and dark trousers dusted liberally with pale wood shavings. There was something smudged along her jaw—charcoal maybe, or dirt—and fresh white bandages wrapped around two fingers of her left hand. Caitlyn’s stomach tightened immediately at the sight.
Vi noticed her standing there and blinked blearily. “Oh,” she said. Her voice came out rough with sleep. Or the lack of it. “You’re awake.”
Caitlyn stared at her.
Vi squinted back down the staircase with visible suspicion. “Why are you holding paperwork like it insulted your family?”
Caitlyn glanced down. Her grip on the documents had indeed become aggressive enough to wrinkle the pages. She loosened her hands immediately. “You missed dinner.”
Vi winced theatrically. “Right to violence this early in the morning, huh?”
“It’s nearly noon.”
Vi looked offended. “That sounds fake.”
Despite herself, Caitlyn felt the corner of her mouth twitch. It vanished quickly when Vi descended the stairs and the light from the windows caught properly on her hands. More cuts, tiny ones this time, thin red lines crossing her knuckles and palms beneath the bandages like careless stitches.
Caitlyn tried not to stare and failed. Vi noticed, because Vi noticed everything when it came to Caitlyn, no matter how much she pretended otherwise. Instinctively, she tucked her hands behind her back. The movement was quick. Embarrassed.
That hurt worse than the cuts themselves.
“You’re injured again,” Caitlyn said quietly.
Vi shrugged one shoulder. “Occupational hazard.”
“What occupation exactly?”
There it was. The question.
Vi hesitated for half a second too long, then shrugged. “Stuff.”
Caitlyn raised an eyebrow. “Very informative.”
Vi shrugged again. “I contain multitudes.”
Caitlyn scoffed and crossed her arms. “You contain concerningly vague answers.”
Vi snorted softly at that, but her gaze slid away toward the workshop door almost immediately afterward. A tiny thing, easy to miss. Caitlyn, however, did not miss it. Something uneasy shifted beneath her ribs.
The hallway filled with a strange stillness then, both of them suspended inside it. Morning light streamed across the floorboards between them, catching on drifting sawdust and dust motes alike until the air itself seemed golden.
Vi looked exhausted, but not hungover. That distinction mattered, Caitlyn realized suddenly. She knew what hungover Vi looked like. Had seen it often enough during those first fractured months after everything with Jinx. Pale-eyed and brittle. Sharp around the edges. Restless in her own skin.
This was different. This was someone consumed. Someone concentrating so fiercely on something that the rest of the world blurred at the edges. It should have reassured her. Instead, somehow, it frightened her more. Because Caitlyn did not know what had hold of Vi so completely.
“Did you sleep at all?” she asked.
Vi rubbed the back of her neck sheepishly. “Um,” she mumbled. “Define sleep.”
She frowned. “Vi.”
She squinted. “I closed my eyes at some point.”
“For how long?”
Another pause.
“Long enough to have a weird dream about a crab with Vander’s voice.”
Caitlyn pinched the bridge of her nose. “That isn’t an answer.”
Vi shrugged yet again. “It’s the only one I’ve got.”
The attempt at humor landed crookedly between them. Vi stepped closer then, close enough for Caitlyn to smell smoke and cedar and that sharp sting of alcohol beneath it all. And, beneath that, something erotic and earthy. Fresh soil, maybe.
Caitlyn frowned slightly. Before she could place it, Vi leaned in and kissed her forehead lightly. “Cait,” she murmured. “Hey.”
The softness of it nearly undid her. Because Vi always got gentler when she was worried about Caitlyn, but never herself.
“I’m okay,” Vi said quietly, like she could hear every frantic thought rattling around inside Cait’s skull. “I’m fine, really.”
Caitlyn searched her face. There were shadows beneath Vi’s eyes, exhaustion carved deep into her expression. Tiny cuts marked her hands and her clothes smelled like alcohol and sleepless nights. But she was looking at her with open affection, real affection, not the distant, hollow look Caitlyn had spent months fearing after the war.
Still… Still.
“You know,” Caitlyn said carefully. Cautiously. “You can tell me if something’s wrong.”
Vi’s expression softened instantly. It was almost saddened as she sighed. “I know, Cupcake.”
The words settled warm in her chest. Vi still didn’t explain. And somehow that silence followed Caitlyn long after Vi disappeared toward the kitchens in search of coffee and something edible, trailing sawdust and sunlight behind her like evidence.
The laughter followed her upstairs, into her bed. Into her dreams and into her head.
Caitlyn woke violently, breath catching somewhere between her lungs and her throat as darkness slammed back into focus around her.
For one terrible, disorienting moment, she did not know where she was. Smoke curled through her mind in ghostly blue ribbons. Funeral lilies. Gunpowder. Her mother’s blood blooming black-red across polished marble. That laugh that sounded like breaking glass.
Caitlyn sat upright too quickly, pulse pounding hard enough to ache. The blankets tangled around her legs as she dragged in a sharp breath, then another, trying to separate dream from memory.
Rain battered the windows. The Manor groaned softly around her.
Her (their) room remained dim and silvered with moonlight, the storm outside turning the world beyond the glass into shifting shadows.
Empty shadows. Her gaze snapped instinctively toward the other side of the bed, which was cold and empty. Again.
The panic arrived immediately this time. Quiet panic, the kind that slid beneath the skin and settled there, icy and intimate.
Caitlyn pressed a hand hard against her mouth for a moment, steadying herself. Her heartbeat still thundered in her ears, tangled hopelessly with the remnants of the nightmare. Funeral flowers scattered across stone. Blue smoke staining the sky over Piltover. Her mother reaching for her and Jinx standing in the wreckage laughing while Vi disappeared somewhere behind her into endless dark—
Caitlyn closed her eye. The image lingered anyway. Sleep had become treacherous after the attack on the Council Chambers. For months afterward, every dream seemed determined to exhume something ugly. Sometimes it was her mother. Sometimes the war. Sometimes Vi bleeding out beneath neon Undercity lights while Caitlyn arrived too late to stop it. She was always too late. That was the worst part. In dreams, she was always too late—
Downstairs, faintly, there was a thunk. Caitlyn froze. Then came the scrape of something dragged roughly across wood and a muffled curse followed. Relief hit first, hot and immediate and humiliatingly intense. Relief so fierce it almost made her dizzy.
Vi was still here. Right beneath her feet. Alive.
Then terror arrived immediately after. Because the workshop light was still on. Because it was nearly three in the morning. Because Vi had gone downstairs after dinner and never come back up. Because Caitlyn could still smell alcohol lingering faintly in the hallway even from here.
Her chest tightened painfully. Before she could stop herself, she threw back the blankets and stood. The Manor felt colder than usual. Storm winds whispered through the ancient halls as she descended the staircase barefoot, one hand gripping the banister tighter with every step downward.
Lightning flashed somewhere outside, illuminating the tall windows in brief bursts of pale electric blue.
The house looked haunted in that light. Perhaps it always had. Kiramman Manor had once been a monument to power. Wealth. Legacy. Love, once.
Now, it was full of ghosts.
Her mother’s favorite books still lined the shelves downstairs. Her father still occasionally paused outside closed rooms as though expecting Cassandra to emerge from them at any moment.
Council documents continued arriving addressed to a dead woman and Vi wandered its halls like someone still uncertain she was allowed to remain.
The workshop light spilled gold beneath the door at the end of the corridor. She stopped several feet away this time. Her pulse thudded painfully against her ribs. She could hear movement inside, small scrapes and a sharp inhale through clenched teeth. “Shit—”
The word came out low and furious.
Caitlyn moved before she could reconsider, crossing the hallway silently until she stood beside the workshop door. The smell hit her immediately. It was stronger tonight, mixed with cedar shavings and smoke and something metallic underneath.
Blood.
Her stomach dropped. Very carefully, Caitlyn rested her fingertips against the edge of the door. It stood slightly ajar. She should knock. She knew she should. Instead, against every instinct she possessed, she looked through the narrow crack and felt something inside her go cold.
Vi sat hunched over the workbench beneath the harsh amber glow of hanging lamps, shoulders tense beneath a threadbare black shirt dusted pale with sawdust. Wood shavings littered every available surface around her in curling golden spirals. Tools lay scattered across the table in violent disarray. A bottle sat near her elbow, half-empty.
Caitlyn’s breath caught, but Vi didn’t notice her. She was too focused on the object clenched in her hands. A small block of wood rested against her palm while she carved at it with intense concentration, brows drawn tight together. Fresh bandages wrapped around two fingers, already spotted through with crimson. Another thin line of blood slid slowly across her knuckles.
Vi hissed sharply through her teeth. “Come on,” she muttered at the wood like it had personally betrayed her. “Why are your ears so fucked up?”
Caitlyn barely heard the words. Her gaze remained fixed on the bottle. On Vi’s shaking hands. On the exhaustion carved deep beneath her eyes. Vi scrubbed one bloody knuckle roughly against her mouth before reaching automatically for the bottle beside her. Caitlyn’s entire body tensed. Vi uncorked it and poured a small amount onto a rag, then pressed the soaked cloth against the wood in her hand with another muttered curse. The sharp scent of alcohol flooded the room instantly.
Caitlyn stared. Something about the motion should have reassured her. Instead, it made everything worse. Because it looked frantic.Because it looked familiar. Because she suddenly realized she had no idea what counted as recovery anymore.
Not for people like them. Vi had survived prison and gang wars and Vander’s death and Powder’s transformation and the end of the world three separate times before turning thirty. She carried grief the way other people carried shadows, constantly and without choice. What if Cait had been foolish to believe love alone could soften that kind of pain? What if peace itself were unbearable after a lifetime of violence?
Inside the workshop, Vi groaned in frustration and dropped her head briefly against the table just for a second, but the exhaustion in the movement hollowed Caitlyn out completely. Vi looked lost. That frightened her more.
She remembered those first months after the war too clearly now. Vi disappearing into the Undercity for hours, coming home bruised and bleeding from pit fights she pretended meant nothing. Nights where Caitlyn found her sitting awake in the dark because sleep meant dreams and dreams meant Jinx. Healing had never been linear for either of them, but this felt like watching someone slowly slip beneath water while insisting they could still breathe.
Inside, Vi picked up the carving again with visibly forced patience and immediately slipped. The blade nicked across her palm. “Fuck!”
The knife clattered loudly onto the table. Blood welled bright against her skin. Vi laughed once under her breath, all brittle and broken.
Something in Caitlyn broke quietly at the sound.
Because she knew that laugh. She knew it intimately. It was the laugh people used when they were trying very hard not to scream. She stepped back from the door before the floorboards beneath her feet could betray her. Her chest ached so badly it felt difficult to breathe.
Inside the workshop, Vi sighed heavily and reached for another bandage without ever looking up. Caitlyn stood motionless in the dim hallway for several seconds longer, staring at the thin line of warm light beneath the door. Relief and terror twisted together viciously inside her.
Vi was here. Vi was alive. And Caitlyn was beginning to think she was losing her anyway.
The roses were drowning.
Caitlyn stood at the edge of the garden path with her arms crossed, watching water spill catastrophically from the tilted watering can in Vi’s hands. The poor flowerbeds looked less like they were being tended and more like they were losing a territorial dispute.
“Vi,” Cait said carefully.
Vi glanced up immediately. “Yeah?”
Caitlyn frowned and gestured vaguely. “You’re flooding them.”
Vi looked down at the roses and back up at Caitlyn. “They looked thirsty.”
Caitlyn stared, blinking.
The roses, meanwhile, appeared one strong breeze away from surrendering entirely to the sea. It had been three days since the nightmare. Three days since she stood outside the workshop door, convincing herself she was watching relapse unfold in slow motion. Three days of trying desperately to behave normally afterward, which was difficult to do when every tiny thing had begun to feel loaded with hidden meaning, like Vi sleeping through breakfast. The bandages around her fingers. The smell of alcohol drifting faintly through the halls at odd hours.
And yet here Vi stood in the Manor gardens on a pale gray afternoon, earnestly attempting to keep hydrangeas alive while wearing one of Caitlyn’s gardening aprons crookedly tied around her waist.
The image was absurd enough to crack something soft open in her chest.
The gardens behind Kiramman Manor had once been pristine in a way only wealthy people could achieve, every hedge sculpted with surgical precision and every flower arranged according to season and status and symmetry. Cassandra Kiramman had loved order. Vi, meanwhile, gardened like she approached most things in life:
with reckless optimism and alarming upper body strength.
“You’re supposed to sprinkle them,” Caitlyn informed her.
Vi’s familiar, freckled nose scrunched up. “I am sprinkling.”
“You’re attacking them, Violet!” Caitlyn exclaimed with great exasperation.
Vi frowned at the flowerbed as though personally betrayed by botany itself. Damp pink hair curled slightly at her temples in the misting drizzle, and there was dirt smeared across one cheekbone.
She looked beautiful. Hopelessly, painfully beautiful.
Caitlyn hated how often fear sharpened that beauty lately.
Vi crouched beside the flowerbeds with visible suspicion, elbows braced against her knees as she stared at the tiny seedlings pushing uncertainly through the soil. “How do flowers survive?” she asked finally.
Caitlyn blinked. “What?”
“They seem emotionally weak.”
Caitlyn laughed before she could stop herself. The sound startled both of them slightly.
Vi grinned immediately, triumphant. “See? That one was funny.”
“It was deeply concerning.”
“But funny?”
“A little.”
Vi looked unbearably pleased by this small victory. Then, her attention drifted back toward the seedlings again, expression softening almost unconsciously. Caitlyn watched her brush one finger carefully against a tiny leaf with surprising gentleness. She wasn’t fighting or flinching. Tender. She was just tending.
The sight hurt in a strange way. Because Vi was trying. Caitlyn could see it everywhere lately if she looked closely enough in herb boxes outside the kitchen windows. The half-burned cookbook abandoned on the counter beside a failed attempt at blackberry scones. The stack of library books appearing mysteriously beside Vi’s side of the bed: history texts, gardening manuals, repair guides.
Domestic little things. Peaceful little things.
As though Vi was painstakingly teaching herself how to exist in a world that no longer required violence from her every second of the day. And maybe that should have eased Caitlyn’s fears. Instead, it only made the late nights and hidden bottles harder to understand.
Rain began falling more steadily overhead, silver and soft against the garden stones. Vi tilted her face toward the sky briefly before groaning dramatically. “Okay, flowers are stupid. I’ve decided this.”
“You declared war on them first.”
“And they escalated it.”
Caitlyn smiled despite herself.
Vi brightened instantly at the sight of it. Gods.
That was the problem. Even now, even tangled up in fear and sleeplessness and worry, Caitlyn loved her so fiercely it sometimes felt indistinguishable from grief.
Rain rattled softly against the Manor windows later that afternoon while Caitlyn stretched along the sitting room sofa with a book balanced open against her knees. A fire crackled low in the hearth. The room smelled faintly of cedar smoke and tea.
Across from her, Vi lounged sideways in an armchair, one boot hanging off the armrest while she held a novel in front of her face with deeply unconvincing concentration. Caitlyn turned a page slowly, watching Vi over the top of her book.
Vi turned her page approximately ten seconds later. Backwards. Caitlyn narrowed her eye slightly. Interesting.
Another few minutes passed in comfortable silence, broken only by rain and crackling firewood. Then Vi subtly adjusted her grip on the novel and a second book hidden inside it slid partially into view.
Caitlyn caught the title immediately. Introductory Wood Carving Techniques.
Her chest tightened. Vi noticed the shift too late.
Quickly, she shoved the book fully back inside the novel with the unmistakable expression of someone caught doing something embarrassing.
Caitlyn blinked. Vi stared at the fire with intense false innocence. Sawdust clung stubbornly to the sleeve of her sweater. A small nick crossed one knuckle beneath fresh bandages.
Questions crowded immediately at the back of her throat. Why woodworking? Why hide it? Why the bottles? Why the secrecy?
Instead, she looked back down at her own book and she said nothing. Because lately every conversation felt balanced delicately on the edge of something neither of them quite knew how to name.
At dinner, the silence felt softer. Maybe a bit strained.
The storm outside had deepened into steady evening rain by then, the windows dark mirrors against candlelight spilling warm gold across the dining room table. Vi had actually eaten tonight. That alone eased something small inside Cait.
They spoke quietly between bites, small things mostly. Council frustrations. The gardener’s horror at Vi’s methods. Whether the Manor library might actually collapse under the weight of its own shelves someday. Normal things. Safe things.
Caitlyn let herself relax enough to forget for one fleeting moment how carefully she had been watching. Then she reached absentmindedly across the table and rested her hand lightly over Vi’s.
Vi flinched. Both of them froze. The movement itself wasn’t dramatic, barely more than an instinctive jerk backward. But Caitlyn felt it like a knife sliding carefully between her ribs.
Vi looked horrified instantly. “Sorry,” she said immediately. Too fast. “Sorry, I just—”
Her bandaged hand curled reflexively against her palm. Caitlyn stared at the white fabric wrapped around her fingers. At the fresh reddish stain blooming faintly through one edge.
“It’s fine,” Cait said softly.
It was not fine.
Vi searched her face anyway like she knew it. Like she always knew it. For one awful second, Cait thought Vi might finally say something. Explain it.
Instead, Vi only looked away.
The rain filled the silence between them.
That night, Caitlyn woke just after midnight to the faint sound of laughter downstairs. Not loud, but just a brief breath of it drifting upward through the manor halls.
Vi.
Caitlyn lay still beneath the blankets, listening carefully. Another soft chuckle followed.
The workshop. Again.
Caitlyn closed her eyes. The sound should have comforted her. Vi was laughing. Vi was sounding lighter than she had in weeks. Instead, something sharp twisted painfully in Cait’s chest.
Because the laughter sounded forced around the edges, like someone practicing happiness in an empty room.
The Council Chambers still smelled like smoke, though not strongly. Most visitors probably wouldn’t notice it anymore, but Caitlyn noticed. She noticed everything.
The scent lingered faintly beneath expensive perfume and fresh ink, the ghost of fire buried deep in the stone itself. Some mornings, Caitlyn imagined the room would smell that way forever, as though tragedy had soaked permanently into Piltover’s foundations.
And perhaps it had.
Sunlight spilled pale and watery through the rebuilt windows lining the walls, illuminating scaffolding still clinging stubbornly to sections of the ceiling. Reconstruction crews had worked tirelessly for months, restoring marble pillars and shattered balconies and scorched stairs piece by painstaking piece.
The room looked beautiful again. Almost. There were still cracks if one knew where to look. Caitlyn supposed the same could be said for most of Piltover now. Most of them.
“The proposed reparations routes through the fissures remain inefficient,” A Councilor was saying from somewhere to Caitlyn’s left. “If trade access isn’t stabilized before winter—”
“The Fissures aren’t stable because half the Undercity infrastructure was destroyed,” another councilor interrupted sharply.
“Which is precisely why—”
The argument blurred into familiar noise. Caitlyn sat at the long table with a pen balanced loosely between her fingers, listening with only partial attention as voices rose and tangled around her. Papers sprawled across the polished desk before her in neat, organized stacks—shipping reports, reconstruction budgets, memorial proposals, and bridge repair estimates.
It was all normal governance. Normal problems. Or as normal as Piltover would ever be again.
Outside the towering windows, the city gleamed beneath overcast skies. Progress Day banners had finally been taken down last week, their bright colors replaced now by construction cranes and healing gardens and memorial walls covered in names. There were so many names, her own mother among them.
Her gaze flickered briefly toward the empty seat across the chamber before she forced herself back to the discussion at hand. This part, strangely enough, had become easier. Not grief. No, never grief. That remained lodged stubbornly beneath her ribs, sharp as shattered glass.
But purpose. Purpose had returned slowly, carefully, like a frightened animal inching from hiding. For months after the attack, Caitlyn had drifted through days numb and furious in equal measure. She had attended funerals. Negotiated ceasefires. Hunted ghosts through Zaun’s streets while half the city watched her with pity and the other half with suspicion. Now, sitting here amid arguments and paperwork and painfully tedious political disputes, she finally felt useful again.
She was not healed, but helping. There was comfort in that. Comfort in rebuilding something tangible from the wreckage.
A Councilor leaned forward across the table, rubbing tiredly at his eyes. “The Memorial Committee also needs final approval on the names engraved along the southern wall.”
A heavy silence followed. No one liked discussing the memorials for long. Caitlyn glanced automatically toward the list attached to the report before stopping herself. She already knew which names were there. The Council moved onward after that, conversation shifting toward bridge repairs and undercity trade routes and the increasingly fragile negotiations between Piltover and Zaun. Awkward tensions crackled constantly now beneath every discussion. It was not just open hostility anymore, but something much stranger indeed. Guilt. Resentment. Hope.
Piltover wanted absolution. Zaun wanted dignity. Neither knew quite how to ask for it.
“The old Sump routes near the fighting pits are still unstable,” someone remarked farther down the table. “We’ll need additional Enforcer patrols there.”
Councilor Hoskel grimaced immediately. “Those pits are still operating?
“Unofficially.”
A quiet scoff answered from the opposite side of the chamber. “They’ll always operate unofficially.”
Several Councilors shifted uncomfortably. Caitlyn kept her attention on the reports before her. Until another voice added casually, “I thought your partner might know more about that situation, Sheriff Kiramman. One of the patrol officers mentioned seeing Vi near the old pits again recently.”
The world narrowed instantly.
Caitlyn looked up. “What?”
The question came out quickly. Too quickly.
The Councilor blinked, visibly surprised by her tone. “Nothing concerning,” he said quickly. “Just passing mention. Apparently, she helped break up some dispute down there last week.”
Last week.
Caitlyn’s stomach dropped. Vi had told her she was running errands in the market that afternoon.
The room suddenly felt too warm. Too crowded. Someone continued speaking—something about security coordination—but the words dissolved into meaningless noise beneath the roaring now filling her ears.
The pits.
Of course.
Memory struck viciously fast after that. Vi returning home bruised during those terrible months after the war. The smell of blood beneath soap and sweat. The way she had stared at walls some nights, like she wanted to punch straight through them.
Caitlyn’s pulse thudded painfully. Had Vi gone back?
The realization settled cold and heavy inside Cait’s chest. Peace. That was the cruelest possibility of all.
Not that Vi was falling apart, but that she simply did not know how to live like this. No war. No crisis. No one to save.
Vi had survived catastrophe after catastrophe for most of her life. Violence shaped her bones.
Survival sharpened her into something fierce and fast and impossible to kill. But ordinary life?
Gardens, books, and soft evenings? Quiet love?
Maybe those things felt alien to someone raised on hunger and heartbreak. Maybe peace itself was unbearable once you had spent long enough becoming a weapon.
The thought hollowed Caitlyn out completely.
“…Sheriff Kiramman?”
She blinked hard. Someone was looking at her expectantly. She realized dimly that the room had gone quiet.
“My apologies,” she said automatically, voice distant even to herself. “Could you repeat the question?”
But she barely heard the answer.
The rest of the meeting passed in fractured pieces after that. Words floated past her uselessly while dread coiled tighter and tighter beneath her ribs.
By the time Caitlyn finally stepped out into the cold evening air hours later, rain had already begun falling across Piltover in fine silver sheets.
The carriage ride home blurred by unnoticed.
Streetlamps glowed gold against wet cobblestones. Crowds drifted beneath umbrellas. Somewhere distant, construction crews still hammered tirelessly at rebuilding the city.
But Caitlyn barely saw any of it.
By the time Kiramman Manor emerged through the rain-dark gardens, she had made up her mind.
No more silence. No more pretending not to notice. She would talk to Vi tonight. Really talk to her. Even if it started a fight. Even if Vi hated her for asking.
The front doors opened with a low groan as Caitlyn stepped inside, rainwater dripping from the hem of her coat. The Manor stood quiet and dark around her, except for one thin line of warm golden light spilling beneath the workshop door at the end of the western hallway.
The storm was furious.
Rain lashed against the walls in violent silver sheets, wind rattling the ancient windows hard enough to make the glass tremble in its frames. Somewhere outside, thunder rolled low and heavy across Piltover, shaking the city with it. Inside the Manor, every light had long since gone dark.
Every light except one.
Caitlyn stood barefoot at the end of the western hallway, staring at the thin golden line beneath the workshop door. It was three in the morning. Again.
Her pulse beat painfully against the base of her throat. For several long seconds, she simply stood there listening. There was no crashing tonight, no loud cursing. Only quieter sounds drifting through the door: the scrape of metal against wood, the soft hiss of a candle, and Vi muttering something unintelligible under her breath.
And that smell, sharp enough now that it cut cleanly through the scent of cedar and smoke lingering in the hallway.
Caitlyn closed her eyes briefly. She was so tired. And not just physically, though there was certainly that too. No, this exhaustion lived somewhere deeper. In the marrow. In the soul. The kind born from carrying fear carefully for too long until it became indistinguishable from habit.
For weeks now, she had been watching Vi disappear by inches. Or believing she was. And tonight, after the Council meeting, after hearing about the pits, after another evening of careful conversation balanced atop unsaid things, Caitlyn simply could not do it anymore.
Thunder cracked somewhere overhead. The workshop light flickered faintly beneath the door. Then Vi swore softly inside. Something in her broke. She opened the door, the hinges creaking quietly.
Inside, Vi startled so violently she nearly dropped the knife in her hand. “Shit—”
She spun halfway around in her chair, eyes wide beneath the warm amber glow of hanging lamps. Actually guilty-looking. That hurt the worst of all.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. Caitlyn took in the room all at once. And confusion struck first, not because the workshop was chaotic. It absolutely was, but not in the way she had imagined.
The entire space looked… lived in. Beautifully. Messily. Warmly lived in. Sawdust covered nearly every available surface in pale golden drifts. Tiny curls of carved wood littered the floorboards around Vi’s workbench like fallen petals. Bundles of drying herbs hung upside down from ceiling hooks beside old Kiramman mechanical schematics. Half-burned candles crowded shelves alongside engineering tools and cracked flowerpots painted in uneven bright colors. Cookbooks sat stacked precariously beside heavy repair manuals. A tray of burnt-looking biscuits rested near the windowsill. Small potted herbs lined the open window above the sink.
And, everywhere, everywhere, there were tiny wooden animals. Dozens of them. Failed ones, mostly. Crooked birds. Misshapen cats. A fox with one ear dramatically larger than the other. Little unfinished creatures scattered through the workshop like evidence of persistent hope.
Caitlyn stared. The sharp scent of alcohol cut through her thoughts again. Her gaze snapped immediately toward the bottle sitting open beside Vi’s elbow, half-empty. Fresh blood welled slowly from a cut across Vi’s palm. Knife in her hand. Bandages unraveling. Sleepless eyes—
Something inside Caitlyn finally gave way completely. “You said you were done.”
The words came out quieter than she intended.
Vi blinked at her from across the room. “Done with what?”
Her chest tightened painfully. “The drinking, Vi.”
Silence.
Actual, genuine confusion crossed Vi’s face. “What?”
The single word hit Caitlyn harder than anger would have. Because Vi truly did not understand what she meant. And somehow that made everything worse. Weeks of fear crashed into her all at once then, sharp and humiliating and impossible to contain any longer.
“You disappear down here every night,” Cait said, voice beginning to crack despite her best efforts. “You barely sleep, you barely eat, you keep showing up covered in cuts and bruises and I smell alcohol constantly and now I hear you’ve been near the fighting pits again—”
Vi’s expression shifted instantly. “Wait, what does that have to do with—”
“And you won’t talk to me.”
The last words came out suddenly raw. Thunder rattled the windows.
Vi slowly set the knife down onto the workbench. “Cupcake—”
“No.” Caitlyn shook her head immediately, tears already burning hot behind her eyes. “No, because every time I ask if something’s wrong, you smile at me and change the subject and then disappear back down here for another six hours and I—”
Her voice broke entirely. Humiliation flooded her immediately afterward. Caitlyn Kiramman did not cry during arguments. She certainly did not cry in the middle of storm-lit workshops surrounded by tiny wooden foxes. And yet tears blurred her vision anyway.
Vi looked horrified. “Hey,” she said softly, standing so quickly her chair scraped harshly across the floorboards. “Hey, talk to me.”
That nearly made Caitlyn laugh. Talk to me. As though she hadn’t been trying.
“I am talking to you,” She whispered.
The workshop suddenly felt unbearably warm. Candlelight flickered gold against the walls while rain battered the windows hard enough to sound almost violent.
Vi took one cautious step closer. Caitlyn noticed fresh blood still slipping slowly down her palm.
“You’re hurting yourself,” She said quietly.
“What? No, I’m—”
“You’re sleeping down here.”
“Sometimes.”
“You skip meals.”
“I forget—”
“You lie to me.”
That stopped Vi completely. Silence flooded the room. Caitlyn wiped angrily at her face, furious with herself for crying now, for unraveling now, for allowing fear to hollow her out this badly. But once the words started, they would not stop.
“I wake up and you’re gone,” she admitted shakily. “Every night lately, I wake up and you’re gone and I walk past this room and smell alcohol and hear you throwing things and hurting yourself and laughing like—”
Her breath hitched painfully.
“Like what?” Vi asked softly.
Caitlyn looked at her then. Really looked at her. At the exhaustion carved deep beneath Vi’s eyes. At the bandages. At the scars. At the woman who had survived so much violence she no longer seemed to know what to do with gentleness.
“Like you’re trying not to fall apart,” Cait whispered.
Vi went very still.
Outside, lightning flashed bright enough to illuminate the entire workshop in stark white for one brief, terrible second. When darkness settled again, Caitlyn realized she was shaking.
“I know what it looks like when someone is drowning right beside me,” she said quietly. “And I know what it feels like to miss it until it’s too late.”
Understanding flickered slowly across Vi’s face then.
Caitlyn laughed once softly through her tears, the sound brittle as broken glass. “Do you know what I thought when they mentioned the pits today?” she asked. “I thought, of course. Of course, she went back there.”
“Cait—”
“Because maybe peace makes you miserable.”
Vi recoiled slightly, as if the words physically struck her.
Caitlyn pressed on anyway because she could not stop now. “Maybe this house is too quiet for you. Maybe gardening and reading and all these soft little things are just pretend and you’re down here every night trying not to claw your way out of your own skin because ordinary life isn’t enough after everything you’ve survived.”
“Stop.”
The word came quietly. Devastated.
Caitlyn barely heard it. “Maybe you’re spiraling and I’m standing here watching it happen again because I was too afraid to ask the wrong questions.”
Thunder cracked violently overhead.
Caitlyn’s voice finally shattered completely. “I can’t survive wondering every day if I’m about to lose you too.”
The silence afterward felt enormous. Vi stared at her. And suddenly, suddenly, everything in her expression changed. Like horror. Slow, dawning horror. Because Caitlyn thought—
Oh.
Oh, no.
“Cupcake,” Vi breathed.
The nickname sounded torn and twisted.
Caitlyn looked away immediately, ashamed now of everything spilling messily between them. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, trying and failing to steady her breathing.
Vi moved forward carefully, like approaching something wounded. “No, no, no,” she said quickly, words tripping over themselves now. “Cait, you got this all backwards, I swear to Janna, I’m not—” She gestured helplessly toward the bottle. “The alcohol’s for the shellac.”
Caitlyn blinked. “The what?”
Vi stared at her for one stunned second longer. Then let out one short, strangled sound somewhere between disbelief and despair before dragging both hands down her face, immediately wincing because of the cuts.
“The finish,” she said helplessly. “For the wood finish. It’s—it’s basically polish, I use alcohol to thin it and clean the brushes and—”
Caitlyn just stared at her. The storm raged outside.
Inside the workshop, surrounded by candles and carved animals and the warm scent of cedar, Vi looked one breath away from panicking herself now.
“You thought I was drinking?” she asked quietly.
The devastation in her voice was unbearable.
For a long moment, neither of them moved. Rain battered the windows. Candles flickered softly through the workshop, their light catching on drifting sawdust and scattered tools and the stunned expression still frozen across Caitlyn’s face.
Across from her, Vi looked stricken, like Caitlyn had reached into her chest and accidentally put her hands around something painfully fragile.
“You thought I was drinking,” Vi repeated quietly.
Caitlyn opened her mouth. Nothing came out. Because yes. Yes, she had. Weeks of fear sat ugly and exposed between them now, impossible to take back.
Vi stared at her another second longer before exhaling shakily and looking away, rubbing one hand across the back of her neck. “Well,” she muttered weakly. “That’s… wow. Okay.”
Caitlyn wanted to disappear into the floorboards. Instead, she stood motionless in the center of the workshop while humiliation and relief and lingering panic tangled violently together beneath her ribs. Vi was not relapsing. Vi was not secretly drinking herself numb downstairs every night. Vi was—
Vi bent suddenly and began shoving things aside across the cluttered workbench with frantic, embarrassed energy. “Wait,” she said quickly. “Hang on.”
Tools clattered. Wood shavings scattered. A stack of books nearly toppled sideways onto the floor before Vi caught them one-handed with a muttered curse.
Caitlyn gaped at her. “What are you doing?”
“I need to show you something before I actually pass away from this conversation.”
Despite herself, something dangerously close to hysterical laughter tried to claw its way up Caitlyn’s throat.
Vi crouched beside one of the lower cabinets, digging through it with increasing agitation.
“Nope, not that one—that one’s horrifying—”
Several small wooden objects hit the floor. One appeared to be some kind of bird. Or perhaps a deeply unfortunate pear. Finally, Vi straightened abruptly with something clutched carefully in her hand. She looked deeply, profoundly uncomfortable, which was rare enough on its own to momentarily distract Caitlyn from the catastrophe still unfolding around them.
Vi cleared her throat, then awkwardly held the object out. It was small enough to fit in Cait’s palm. A mongoose. It was roughly carved from pale wood, with uneven little paws and a tail slightly too thick for the rest of its body. One ear sat marginally higher than the other, and the snout had clearly been sanded down and reshaped so many times that the wood there looked softer than the rest.
It was imperfect. Crooked, yet carefully made. Cradled.
Caitlyn stared at it silently.
Vi immediately started talking too fast. “Okay, in my defense, mongooses are weirdly difficult shaped animals and also apparently wood carving is a nightmare invented specifically to humble me personally.”
Caitlyn looked up slowly. Vi was blushing. Actually blushing, her freckles more prominent in the flicker-flame of the swaying candles.
“I’ve been teaching myself,” she admitted, gesturing vaguely around the workshop. “The books help a little, but mostly I just keep cutting myself and swearing at furniture.”
As if summoned by the statement, a bead of blood slid slowly down the side of her palm from the fresh cut there.
Caitlyn’s chest tightened painfully. “I noticed,” she said softly.
Vi winced. “Yeah.”
The workshop suddenly felt unbearably intimate around them. Warm candlelight. Rain against the windows. The scent of cedar and smoke and drying herbs hanging thick in the air.
Homey.
That was the word.
Homey.
Vi rubbed the back of her neck again, visibly fighting embarrassment now. “I wanted to make you something,” she admitted quietly. “Like a real thing. Not something bought. Something with my hands.”
Caitlyn looked back down at the mongoose. Its tiny carved face stared determinedly upward with crooked dignity. Emotion rose sharp and sudden in her throat.
“I kept messing them up,” Vi continued. “That’s why there are so many terrible ones everywhere.” Her voice softened slightly. “And I didn’t want you seeing the unfinished versions because they looked… stupid.”
Caitlyn glanced around the workshop again and suddenly she saw it. The evidence. The evidence of trying. Tiny carved flowers abandoned beside sandpaper and carving knives. Handwritten recipe cards covered in messy annotations, too much cinnamon, burned again somehow, ask Cait how ovens work. Gardening notes folded beside seed packets. Library books stacked haphazardly everywhere: woodworking, baking, botany, repair manuals, history texts. Painted flowerpots drying near the windows. Half-finished shelves leaning against the walls. Little scraps of domesticity tucked carefully into every corner of the room.
Caitlyn’s eye burned suddenly. Vi watched her carefully, uncertainty flickering beneath all the embarrassment now.
“You said once,” Vi began quietly. “That after…” She stopped. Couldn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to.
After Cassandra.
After grief hollowed the Manor into something cold and cavernous and haunted.
Vi looked down at her own cut hands. “You said your house never really felt like a home after that.”
The storm softened slightly outside, rain turning gentler against the windows.
Vi shrugged one shoulder helplessly. “So I thought maybe I could make one.”
The words shattered something inside Caitlyn completely. While she had been standing outside this workshop, terrified Vi was destroying herself, Vi had been down here painstakingly teaching her scarred hands how to build a life. For her. For them.
Caitlyn covered her mouth briefly, breath trembling.
Vi noticed immediately and panicked. “Okay, no, don’t cry again, I’m serious, I can’t survive that right now—”
A laugh escaped Caitlyn before she could stop it.
Vi visibly relaxed by several degrees. “There you are,” she murmured softly.
Gods. Caitlyn loved her so much it felt unbearable sometimes.
Vi hesitated another second before grimacing and reaching back into the cabinet.
“There’s also this one,” she muttered reluctantly.
She held out another carving.
Caitlyn stared. “Vi.”
“It’s a hedgehog.”
“It looks haunted.”
“It was supposed to look less haunted.”
The creature was objectively terrible. Round in all the wrong places, with tiny uneven spikes carved across its back and two dark little eyes that somehow conveyed profound existential despair.
Caitlyn adored it instantly.
“It’s perfect,” she whispered.
Vi barked out a disbelieving laugh. “You are such a liar.”
“I’m not.”
“You absolutely are.”
But she looked delighted anyway.
The tension in the room finally began loosening then, unwinding slowly from around both of them. The storm outside softened to steady rain while candlelight painted warm gold across the workshop walls. Vi leaned back against the workbench with visible exhaustion. Only then did Caitlyn notice the bandage around her hand had nearly come undone completely. Blood stained the edges crimson. Her stomach twisted reflexively. It was not fear, but concern. Simple, ordinary concern.
“Come here,” She said quietly.
Vi blinked. “What?”
“Your hand.”
“It’s fine.”
“Vi.”
A pause.
Then Vi sighed dramatically and shuffled closer. Caitlyn took her hand carefully between both of hers. Vi immediately went very still. This time when Caitlyn examined the injuries, she truly saw them. Tiny cuts crossing roughened palms. Splinters embedded near her fingertips. Small burns along one wrist from baking trays. Calluses forming in new places from carving tools.
Gentle injuries. Creative injuries. The marks of someone learning how to make things instead of break them.
Caitlyn’s throat tightened painfully. “You really have been cutting yourself constantly,” she murmured.
Vi looked deeply offended. “Woodworking is violent.”
Despite everything, Caitlyn laughed again softly.
Then, more carefully this time, she unwound the ruined bandage from Vi’s hand while rain whispered against the windows and the workshop glowed warm around them like the beginning of something neither of them quite knew how to name yet.
The workshop windows stayed open now. Even when it rained. Especially when it rained, actually.
Vi claimed the air helped the wood dry properly, though Caitlyn suspected she mostly liked the sound of storms drifting through the room while she worked. Weeks passed quietly after the fight. It was not perfect. Nothing about healing had ever been perfect for either of them. But it was quiet. Which, Caitlyn was beginning to realize, might be better.
The workshop changed slowly during those weeks. Or perhaps she simply learned how to see it properly. What had once looked chaotic now revealed its softer patterns. Stacks of woodworking books migrated gradually from the floor onto shelves Vi built herself—crooked shelves, admittedly, though improving steadily. Tiny jars of herbs dried along the windowsills beside scattered carving tools and abandoned teacups. The scent of cedar became permanent, woven now into the fabric of the manor itself alongside old polish and rainwater and candle smoke. Life settled there, warm and wandering and wonderfully untidy.
Most afternoons, Caitlyn worked downstairs now. The habit simply formed. One rainy evening she had carried reports into the workshop intending only to check on Vi for a few minutes. Then another evening. Then another.
Now, the room seemed to gather them both instinctively at the end of each day. Caitlyn would stretch along the old sofa beneath the windows with reports balanced across her knees while Vi carved nearby at the workbench, sleeves rolled messily to her elbows, muttering occasional threats toward stubborn pieces of wood.
The sounds became familiar quickly.
Scrape.
Sand.
Curse.
Repeat.
“You’re glaring at that fox like it owes you money,” Caitlyn observed one afternoon without looking up from her paperwork.
Across the room, Vi narrowed her eyes at the tiny carving in her hand. “It knows what it did.”
“That feels unlikely.”
“You weren’t there.”
Rain whispered softly through the open windows while sawdust drifted lazily across the floorboards between them. Somewhere in the gardens outside, wind chimes clinked gently in the breeze.
Peaceful sounds.
Caitlyn was still learning how to trust them. Sometimes she glanced up from her documents just to watch Vi work. The concentration fascinated her. Vi carved the way she fought—completely consumed by it. Brows furrowed. Shoulders tense. Tongue occasionally caught between her teeth when particularly focused.
The little animals improved steadily, too. They were not perfect, never perfect, but at least recognizable. The latest hedgehog looked significantly less cursed. Caitlyn had proudly placed it on her bedside table anyway.
Vi pretended to hate this, but Caitlyn saw the way she smiled in secret, all soft and sweet.
The garden boxes came next.
That disaster occupied nearly two full weeks of their lives.
“You’re building them too large,” Cait informed Vi from the Manor steps one bright morning.
Vi wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her wrist, leaving a streak of sawdust across her temple. “They need room to thrive.”
Caitlyn frowned. “They’re carrots.”
Vi frowned too. “They have dreams, Cait.”
Caitlyn laughed quietly into her tea. The sound still made Vi glance over automatically every single time, like she was checking it was real.
By the end of the week, the garden boxes stood slightly uneven but sturdy beneath the spring sunlight. Vi hovered beside them afterward with unmistakable parental anxiety while Caitlyn planted herbs.
“You’re crowding them,” Vi warned immediately.
“You drowned the roses.”
The kitchen suffered equally beneath Vi’s newfound domestic ambitions. Burnt pastries became a recurring feature of life at Kiramman Manor. As did smoke. And swearing.
One memorable evening ended with both of them sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor eating blackberry tarts that tasted faintly of charcoal because Vi refused to admit defeat.
“They’re crunchy,” Vi insisted around a mouthful.
“They’re cremated, darling.”
“Coward,” Vi muttered.
Caitlyn kissed powdered sugar from the corner of her mouth anyway.
The fear never vanished entirely. That was the truth of it. Some wounds healed cleanly. Others lingered quietly beneath the skin forever.
Every so often, Caitlyn still woke suddenly in the middle of the night, heart pounding hard against her ribs, one hand reaching instinctively across cold sheets before she was fully conscious. Sometimes Vi was there beside her, sprawled diagonally across the mattress like a woman personally wronged by blankets. Sometimes she wasn’t.
Those moments still hurt. They frightened her, just differently now. Because now, when Caitlyn followed the faint glow of workshop light downstairs through the sleeping Manor, she no longer found herself frozen outside the door, imagining catastrophe.
Now, she opened it and found Vi alive inside the warmth, carving and reading and burning pastries at unreasonable hours. Living.
One particularly brutal Council meeting one morning, Caitlyn arrived at her desk already exhausted from three hours of negotiations regarding bridge tariffs and trade routes through Zaun. The Precinct buzzed with low conversation around her while sunlight spilled pale gold through the rebuilt windows overhead.
Caitlyn set down her satchel and paused.
There, resting neatly atop her paperwork, sat another wooden animal. A fox, beautifully carved this time. It was a till slightly imperfect—the tail too sharp at the curve, one paw uneven—but elegant nonetheless. Clever-looking. Stubborn-looking. Very familiar.
A tiny folded note rested beneath it. Caitlyn unfolded the paper carefully.
Made the nose too sharp. Thought of you immediately.
Warmth bloomed instantly through her chest. She turned the tiny fox carefully between her fingers, thumb brushing over smooth carved wood polished painstakingly by scarred hands she knew now better than her own.
Outside the windows, Piltover glittered beneath clear spring skies. And, later that night, when Caitlyn returned home and found warm golden light once again spilling beneath the workshop door, she smiled before she even realized she was doing it.
The workshop light still burned late into the night sometimes. But now, when Caitlyn followed it downstairs, she understood what she would find there.