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The jingle of brass keys forces Vi’s eyes open.
For a moment, she’s somewhere else, stuffed even farther below ground. A smoother wall at her back, a dull ache in her head, a pacing grief within her. Much of that is present here and now: there’s cool concrete against her forehead, and she flexes her bloodied knuckles as she eases away from the stone. A little more light down here, at least. A little more air.
Vi doesn’t need to turn around to know who’s standing on the other side of the door, who’s holding the keys— the clicking of heeled boots is sign enough.
“Thought I might find you here.”
Caitlyn’s voice is guarded. When Vi glances over her shoulder, she’s a portrait of reserve. Her expression is cool, her demeanor measured. Her uniform, now bare of the insignia that once heralded her betrayal, is crisp and black, a dark coat ironed and smoothed over her shoulders. She stands with her back straight and her chin high, and she doesn’t look unlike she did the first time they met. Like she could be a stranger. But then Vi watches as her brow furrows, as a hand reaches out to trace a rusted bar, and she knows they’re both back there in their heads. Before this, whatever it was, loomed between them, before her escape from a cell meant anything more to Caitlyn than a lead, than chasing answers. She knows the look on those sharp features; it mirrors her own. They’re lost in the memory together.
Caitlyn turns the key. The lock clicks open, and Vi can almost hear the retreating echo of a warden’s cane on the floor beneath her feet. Before her, through the slats, Caitlyn’s eyes are weary. Wearier than the first time.
“What happened?”
Vi’s aching fists clench at her sides. She has to look away to force the words from her throat, thudding her forehead against the wall and trying to remember how to breathe.
“I really believed she’d help.” Vi screws her eyes shut, as though that affords her more courage. “Say it. You told me so. I was an idiot to trust her, I went behind your back.” she can’t help the thorns that twist around her words, fettering her to her honesty, choking her with her own sentiment.
“I choose wrong every time. And because of it, I've lost everyone .”
Powder, Vander, Mylo, Claggor. Vander, Cassandra, Jinx. Vander, again and again and again. It’s not so different from how she imagines Hell. That same choice, that same loss, over and over and over. No matter what she does.
Vi’s hands come up to clutch at her throat, at the back of her neck, and for a frenzied moment she wishes she could tear the tattoos from her flesh. Constant, mocking reminders of resilience, when so much around her has fallen away. It isn't fair. It isn’t deserved. If not for her, they'd be more than ghosts.
There’s a harrowing silence between her and her captor, her savior, the woman with the key to so much more than her cell, echoing within the space they occupy. Distantly, water drips onto stone.
“I let her go.”
Vi turns once more, as Caitlyn’s admission cuts like a blade across her chest. She stares. The cell door opens with a creak.
“What?”
The woman before her has eyes like the sky, crisp and clean in a way she used to think she’d never see again, trapped forty stories down in the dark. “I fear we don’t have much time. Jayce believes war is coming. I’ve given us a bit of a grace period, but I…” she closes those eyes for a moment, steeling herself against what Vi can only hope is the weight of her conscience. Lonely months stretch between them like hands, grasping and grasping.
“Vi,” Caitlyn says. “We need to talk.”
———————
Topside is quiet this time of night. The whole city seems to be holding its breath.
Caitlyn and Vi slip through the streets unnoticed, sights set on the polished gates that loom at the end of a cobbled drive, as cool wind whips up into Caitlyn’s ponytail. She huffs a breath as she fishes a peculiarly shaped key from her cloak pocket, fitting it into a hidden slot in the iron bars. Vi flexes her scabbing knuckles within the pockets of her own jacket, something heavy and insulated and likely from Caitlyn’s closet. It smells faintly of vetiver, and keeps the chill away from her skin. Caitlyn leads her inside the grounds wordlessly, metal groaning as the gates close behind them.
They ascend the wide, golden stairs within the entrance hall, their boots the only sound reverberating throughout the yawning space. This kind of luxury, of excess, used to make Vi’s lip curl in disgust. But now, the absence of Caitlyn’s mother is palpable within the room, and makes her ache with grief. She scans the sitting area below them with a weight in her chest. All the lamps have been turned off, shrouding the scene in deep shadow, and vases of half-dead flowers still litter nearly every available surface. There are large, ostentatious bouquets with tags sporting House crests even Vi can recognize, and smaller, hand-picked bundles, discarded and forgotten all the same. The coffee table is laden with empty teacups and saucers, and piles upon piles of equally opened and unopened letters. She doubts Tobias uses this room often. She wonders if he’s even home. If Caitlyn has time for him, around all of this. She swallows the bitter taste in her mouth.
Guilt licks at the edges of this darkened picture, and it tugs and tugs at Vi’s chest as she reaches the top of the banister, close at Caitlyn’s heels. In another world, she’d be glad to have a tour of the Kiramman estate in all of its egregious glory. In this one, she’s dog tired. The solace here, the silence, it’s a ticking time bomb. Jayce believes war is coming, Caitlyn had said. Who knows how long they have?
Caitlyn’s room sits at the end of a long, shadowed hallway. Although less stifling than downstairs, thanks to the thrown-open windows, it’s not in much better shape. The lamps are off, the lack of light casting shades of blue and black across the walls. Her bed is unmade, sheets crumpled near the foot of the mattress, and clothes in similar shades of blue and black are strewn about on the floor near her wardrobe. Multiple rifle prototypes lean against one of the windowsills, and a tattered cloak has been thrown over her desk chair. Vi eyes the symbol woven in gold thread across the back, bile in her throat, but says nothing. She nearly kicks over a glass of water as she steps into the room and closes the door behind her, pausing by the doorway, and she follows Caitlyn’s gaze to the cracked mirror beside her bed. Shards of it still glint from the shag carpet, in the blue of the rising moon outside. Finally removing her hands from her pockets, Vi flexes her sore shoulders and remembers to exhale. She spares a glance to a wheeled chalkboard looming in the corner of the room, a dark tapestry covering most of it, but not enough that she doesn’t recognize the contents beneath. Red string, wanted posters, clippings of magazines and hastily scrawled notes. Vi had watched Caitlyn put some of this together, off to the side, heart torn—that feels like lifetimes ago, now.
Caitlyn reaches the foot of her bed. For a moment, she wavers there, on unsteady legs, hand stalled on its way to clutch at the canopy. She’s a banner in a light wind, a symbol, billowing and rippling, larger than life. Then she turns to Vi, tears shining on her cheeks as they slip from her eyes, and she’s nothing but human.
Vi bites her tongue. She wants to reach out, to forgive, to soothe, but she can’t. Not yet. Not when betrayal and heartbreak and pure, animal grief tether her to the floor. She doesn't move. She can’t go down without a fight.
“I let her go.” Caitlyn whispers it into the dark. The first thing she’s said since the cell, repeated into the space between their bodies. All of it, for nothing. “She—she handed me the keys. I let her walk away.”
“Okay.” says Vi. All of it, for nothing .
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to make this right.” Caitlyn sits down on the rumpled comforter. She jolts, and reaches beneath the fabric to fish something out from under where she sits. Her hand emerges fisted in a wrinkled, dark jacket. Familiar gold filigree lines the lapels. Caitlyn stares at it for a moment too long, fresh tears welling in her eyes, before she crumples it up and throws it at the wall with enough force that the dull noise echoes.
Blood turns to ice in Vi’s body. She almost wants to laugh, at the whole of it. The profound absurdity of yet another loss.
“Come on.” she says. It’s as though she’s talking through a mouthful of nails. “You didn’t, Cait.”
Caitlyn puts her head in her hands. All at once, like a storm surge, Vi realizes she’s shit out of room within her to hurt. She’s hit capacity. She’s had enough .
“What do you want from me?” Vi doesn’t care how her voice rumbles with pain. It pours from her as freely as blood.
“Are you done? Is this as good as over?” She gestures to the stale air between them, the paces between their bodies, even though Caitlyn’s not even looking at her. Even though it doesn’t matter, now.
“I don’t even know what to think anymore, Caitlyn. It’s too much. It’s all too fucking much.” Vi feels as though she could vomit. She’s harboring the kind of anger that strangles you, that refuses to let the right words out of your mouth. Caitlyn moves her hands away from her face, with the sort of hesitance that suggests she’d rather die, and looks at Vi. Least she could fucking do.
Caitlyn opens and closes her mouth. The lines under her eyes are even more pronounced in the dim, and she looks exhausted. Bitterly, Vi thinks, good.
“So, what? Am I just tucking tail and slinking back into your life? Are you going to keep acting like nothing happened?” Her body is thrumming with an aching fury, her fists clenching and unclenching at her sides. She’s had months to practice this conversation in her head, over and over and over with blood in her teeth and dirt under her nails. She’s imagined tearing Caitlyn to pieces. She’s imagined falling to her knees. Suddenly, though, the magnitude of her emotion strangles her, as though there’s too much trying to force its way out at once.
“Vi,” Caitlyn falters, can’t quite find the words, and turns her face away from her again. That only makes the pulse in Vi’s head thrum harder, the needles in her throat even sharper.
“Explains the way Officer Nolan looked at me earlier, I guess . Like I had crawled my way up from the fucking gutter.” Vi laughs, a mirthless, dried-out thing. “You wrung me out of your system that quickly, huh?”
Caitlyn is shaking her head miserably.
“I couldn’t— it wasn’t , it was nothing. I hardly let her touch me. I could only— it was just-“ she’s trembling, slightly. Her eyes are trained on the polished buckle of her boot. Vi watches her take a deep, shuddering breath.
“Oh, that’s rich.” Vi takes one step forward, her vision tunneled and white-hot, and tries to breathe. When they flicker up at her movement, Caitlyn’s eyes are narrowed and swimming with hate— but not for Vi. This uneases her further; only makes her more outraged.
“Am I supposed to be flattered? Supposed to be glad you thought of me at all? That’s bullshit, Cait. We both know it.” Vi takes one more step, closing the distance, and Caitlyn shrinks away from her attention like a cornered animal.
“I know.” Caitlyn grits out. “I know! Fuck, Vi, do you think I don’t understand your anger? Do you think it’s not tearing me to pieces? I stumbled through it blindly , and all I could do was wonder where you were, if you were alive, if you were doing yourself the mercy of forgetting me the way I couldn't.” Bitter, defensive heat claws its way up the back of Vi’s neck. She curls her lip.
“I was doing just fine, Cupcake. Probably broke a rib for good. Destroyed what’s left of my liver. Saw you in every face I passed.” She’s not sure why she says it, and doesn’t care. Resentment has turned her throat to sandpaper. “While you were fucking your inferior.”
Caitlyn’s eyes flicker to her ribs at the attack, at the nickname, gaze stuck on that fucking spot, before her expression withers into devastation.
“It was only ever you.” She whispers to the space between them. To the wound on Vi’s abdomen. “It’s not fair to say that to you. But it’s honest. I closed my eyes and I just wanted it to be you. I touched her so as not to drown in your absence.”
Vi staggers through her next breath. The admission feels like a shot to the heart, and makes the fury within her curdle into something deeper. Something resigned, something exhausted. She hadn’t thought it possible to feel loss in this capacity—as though she’d ever been designed for anything else.
“The hole I couldn’t fill, the space you left. If it was going to tear me apart, at least it was on my terms.” Caitlyn whispers it into the dark, as though she’s afraid of her own words.
Suddenly, unbidden, the taste of sour liquor blooms on Vi’s tongue. She can smell the dim, filthy room she slept fitfully within. The four walls that shrunk around her for months. Her bloodied knuckles ache from the pressure of punches long gone.
Control. A chance to pick your poison. Vi almost understands. But Caitlyn’s never put her heart on her sleeve; not like Vi. Caitlyn can compartmentalize, can shove aside feelings within physicality. Can shoot to kill. Vi thinks about fleeting, unfamiliar touches under flashing lights. She thinks about the fists thrown whenever someone stepped too close. A fire churns within her blood.
“The space I left?” She’s almost too hoarse to shout, but not quite. “You mean the one you punched out for me when you left me down there? After everything I shoved aside to make room for you?”
Caitlyn balls her fists in her lap, eyes flashing. “I didn’t ask you to! You made the choice—I never demanded anything of you!”
Vi sneers. “No, Cait, you did. You know that as well as I do. You sprung the badge on me, you wanted me to fill those shoes, knowing how deeply it went against everything I stand for.” Vi shakes her head, jaw twitching, takes a deep breath through her nose. She sees, for a moment, the dull reflection in the eyes of her own mother in the rubble of the bridge. Of the lifeless, perfect face of a councilor, the set of her features so nearly identical to those of the woman before her, laying in a gilded casket. Of all the people in Vi’s life she hadn’t the luxury to bury. Cycles and cycles and cycles. Sacrifices upon sacrifices upon sacrifices.
“You always had a choice, Vi. You could have refused.” Caitlyn is wringing her hands in her lap, one pointer finger picking at the skin of her thumbnail. “I know it was wrong of me. I thought–I don’t know what I thought. Hardly much of anything, if I'm honest. I can hardly remember it some days.” She blinks, as though clearing a fog from her eyes.
“While you were gone, what I did—what Ambessa expected of me. I can't explain it in a way that makes it okay. I–” Caitlyn growls in frustration, hands balling into fists in her lap. Vi studies her carefully. Sees the moment rage flickers in her eyes.
“I didn’t want this! Any of this! The cape, the badge, the title. It’s all bullshit. Commander– ” Caitlyn spits the word out like it’s steeped in poison. “Ridiculous.”
“She told me I was doing the right thing; that I was fulfilling my birthright, doing a duty. I was keeping Piltover safe. So many speeches about vengeance, about justice. A proper fucking fool I was to believe her. How was I supposed to know she was trying to gut it from the inside out?”
“You couldn’t see past the barrel of your own gun!” Vi remembers the way her eyes had flashed through the scope, the way unsteady fingers had pulled the trigger, had missed. Caitlyn’s teeth bared, a wild fervor in her eyes that washed her in an unrecognizable light. “You were too far gone to see through it. She was using your grief against you.” Caitlyn glares up at her, lip curled.
“And I damn well know that now, don’t I? I’m not like you, Violet, I can’t push it down like you can.” Caitlyn runs a hand through her hair and tugs, as if to steady herself. Her head hangs miserably, her shoulders hunched. “Despite it all, despite everything you’ve had taken from you, you’ve stayed so good. So selfless. So genuine. You’re no stranger to loss, Gods know, and you’ve just— it hasn’t changed you. Not at your core.” Caitlyn’s voice wavers.
“I don’t know how to do that. I don’t fucking know who I am after all this.”
Vi falters. The flames lapping at her heart subside, only briefly, and she blinks in confusion.
“And you think I do? Cait, you asked me to kiss the badge, I tried. You asked me to hunt down Jinx, I tried , okay? I was trying to do the right thing. Trying to grapple with the fact that the fight was so much bigger than the three of us.” Something she doesn’t think she’ll ever understand, the thousands of ways this has ricocheted outwards into the peripheries of her life, the lives of so many innocents and so many evils. Somehow, always, she and her sister traced to the center of it all. Time and time again.
Caitlyn’s eyes narrow, still fixed on somewhere just past Vi’s hip.
“Watching you sacrifice so much, joining the fight as an enforcer, going after your sister, knowing it was all for me, I couldn’t bear it. I have done nothing to earn this loyalty, this devotion, but it’s who you are, Vi. You’re so good. And when you begged me not to change, when I—“ Caitlyn touches her lips, briefly, eyes wide, and that’s so much worse than her admitting it out loud. Than acknowledging it outright. There’s a fist clenched around Vi’s heart.
“I looked you in the eyes and I promised you the impossible. I had already changed, was still changing, and I hated who I was becoming. You deserved that honesty from me, at the very least, and I was too cowardly to give it to you.” Caitlyn’s mouth is a cold, thin line. Her eyes flicker with something reserved and strange, and Vi’s fingers flex restlessly at her sides. She shakes her head.
“You—you shouldn’t have had to do it alone. I’d never have let you. That’s not fair.” Her mind flickers to the darkness of the rooms downstairs, the dried flowers in their vases, the cold tea. The silence, the funeral, the grief so potent in all of Caitlyn’s surroundings .
“Neither should you, Vi. I never should have left you. I don’t— you needed me and I just—“ Caitlyn is shaking her head vehemently, bottom lip caught between her teeth, and finally tilts her head up to look Vi in the eyes again. “I didn’t even think about how much this was all hurting you, too.”
“I just wanted—” Vi doesn’t know how to explain it to her, how neatly her heart has been torn in half. Two shades of blue fester within her, unceasing in their intensity. Two vastly different and equally consuming shades of the same love. “I wanted to make it right. I thought I was ready. I thought I could push who she used to be to the side, could remove Powder from the equation. This is as much my fault as it is hers, and I thought I could make a fucking difference.”
Caitlyn sighs. “This isn’t your fault, Vi.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not what you said in the tunnels.”
Caitlyn freezes, twitching fingers stalled against her knee. Vi feels a twinge of remorse for throwing that moment back in her face, but she let the words gnaw at her heart until they all blurred into one, for months upon lonely months, until they dissolved at the bottom of a glass. It’s her blood in your veins. Vi bites her cheek against the threat of the tears welling in her eyes.
“I didn’t mean that.” Caitlyn’s voice is a hoarse whisper. She scrubs a hand over her mouth. “You have to know I didn't mean that.”
Vi’s stomach churns. She wrestles against the next thing out of her trembling mouth.
“Did you mean to hit me?”
There’s hardly any bite in her words. She almost wishes it had been more accusatory; it’s only a broken, desperate question. Vi needs to know, above all else, the truth. Needs to know if the circles she carved into her head down in Zaun, within the decrepit remnants of her life, have any semblance of truth within them. Needs to know, needs to, that Caitlyn’s not just another gilded piece of Piltover; not just another Topsider chomping at the bit to put her in her place. She wonders if their months apart whittled away at the heart Caitlyn had when she broke Vi out of Stillwater.
Silence drags between them. Vi forces herself to tear her gaze from the floor and stare at the woman in front of her. If she’s going to lose this fight, she may as well go down with dignity.
Caitlyn reaches out suddenly, hand towards the wound on Vi’s stomach, and Vi flinches. It’s instinct, it’s subconscious.
Caitlyn bursts into tears.
“Oh, Vi. ” She whimpers. “Vi, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She places her warm, trembling palm to Vi’s stomach. Vi, frozen where she stands, lets her. From that contact spring three unstoppable, agonizing strands of memory, woven together within her heart.
Metal claws gouged deep into Vi’s stomach, every twitch of breath a world of unmeasurable pain, Sevika’s voice a gnarled mockery in her ear. She’s thrown aside like an afterthought. One, two, three shots, the satisfying clang of bullet against brass. A warm hand clasped against her own. The beginning.
Vi staggers forward a step, her knees knocking against Caitlyn’s, steadying one hand around a wooden bedpost.
A rush of fire through Vi’s body, chemically induced salvation, her head full of cotton and her insides ablaze. The comedown, twitches of pain in her gut that slither away into a dull ache, blood clotting and wound stitching shut. Soothing, gentle words. Caitlyn’s breath is warm where it puffs against her mouth. Easy, she says. Easy. she’s stroking Vi’s cheek. They’re close, so close, the closest an Enforcer has even been to her without a boot to her spine or a fist to her cheek. She’s holding Vi like she's worried she might break. Like she’s something worth holding on to. Easy, easy, easy.
Caitlyn’s other hand comes out to rest on Vi’s opposite hip, fingers flexing into the fabric of her undershirt, holding her in place.
Cold, hard floor. The retreating pangs of boots against metal ladder rungs. Vi clutches her stomach, hands pressed against what will likely bloom into a deep bruise around the scar tissue there. She’s curled into herself on the stone, bowled over with the force of her heart’s undoing. The reverberations of her own sobs against the high walls, the room an echo chamber of her agony. Her gauntlets lay cooling beside her. She doesn’t know how long she cries for. She’s alone again.
Hot tears spill from Vi’s eyes. She hadn’t noticed she’d lost her fight with them, and now she can’t stop. She watches, feels, as one rolls down to her chin, drips down into Caitlyn’s lap. Caitlyn looks up at her, moonlight tinseled into her hair, utterly devastated.
“Cait,” Vi whispers. She screws her eyes shut, and more tears fall. “I can’t take it. I can’t lose anything else. It’s too much.”
Caitlyn’s palms are hot and firm against her body. She’s smoothing a thumb over the outline of the bandage on Vi’s stomach, as though she can’t help it. She meets Vi’s gaze, watery, desperate.
“I know.” Caitlyn breathes, as fresh tears spill from her eyes, too. “I know.
“It isn’t fair of me to have brought you here. It isn’t fair of me to argue with you, after all of this. Every look you gave me, every glance, as you watched me deviate further from myself, it was debilitating. I spent nights upon nights steeped in self-hatred, wondering what you could see in me that I couldn’t recognize at the time. Wondering what I’d done to deserve your presence in my life. After everything, Vi, I’m not sure I do. I won’t be so foolish as to beg your forgiveness. I won’t act as though I understand even a shred of your anger. If I could only be so selfish as to—” Caitlyn bites off the words, shakes her head, eyes fluttering shut for a moment. Her fingers grip Vi’s hip like iron.
With a slow draw of breath, Vi eases back from the bedpost, away from where she and Caitlyn’s knees have tangled, away from Caitlyn’s hands , and sits beside her on the edge of the bed. Toes off her boots and turns her body, one leg crossed beneath her, waiting for Caitlyn to continue. The darkness of her bedroom is nearly suffocating her now, too reminiscent of the endless night of Stillwater, and so Vi lets her gaze hang instead on the rising moon outside, on an unobstructed and inalienable view of the night sky.
“Vi,” Caitlyn tries again, voice small. “You have to know that I–”
“Don’t.” All at once, a rearing of nauseating emotion in Vi’s stomach. This isn’t—she can’t— “I want to trust you. Caitlyn, I want to trust this. But I don't…” she shakes her head, watches Caitlyn’s face fall. “I don’t know how.”
Caitlyn’s bottom lip trembles, just slightly. “I’m not deserving of it. I know that. But you have to know: How I feel about you, Vi, I can't wish that away. Gods know I thought it would be easier to try.” She reaches out once more, palm toward Vi’s face this time, and helplessly, subconsciously, Vi leans in, pushes her cheek into the warmth. It shocks the both of them, Caitlyn’s gasp ringing like a bell around the silence in her room, Vi’s foggy eyes shut tightly against her touch. Caitlyn takes a deep breath, emboldened by the olive branch Vi is holding out to her.
“You were always there. Throughout it all, every choice I made and every bridge I burned, it was your face I saw at night. At my worst, I tried to make my way down to the Undercity to find you, and every time I stepped too far out of line Ambessa or–” Vi feels in the vibration along Caitlyn’s hand that she’s shaking the memory free. A mercy; Vi doesn’t want to hear the name, not now. “It was fruitless. I thought it better for you that I didn’t show my face, anyway. You would have been well within your right to run me through where I stood. For what I'd done to you.”
“I wanted to.” Vi whispers, eyes still screwed shut. “I thought about it nearly every day. Kept me on my feet in the ring, the anger, the spite. Until it didn’t, anymore. I started–” Losing, forgetting, missing. Waiting to die. “I just lost the will to fight, I guess. The punches didn’t come as easily. And then, I started seeing you on the floor of the ring, laying beside me, when they would have to scrape me off the concrete.” She shudders at the memory, the feeling of her own cooling blood against her face, against the ground. Hazily, Caitlyn’s eyes in her mind, a far-away soothing touch that mirrored the one cupping her face right now. She sighs.
“I made a lot of mistakes, too.”
Caitlyn huffs. It’s a nearly frustrated sound. Vi lets her eyes fall open, letting Caitlyn’s pleading stare pierce straight through her.
“I want to believe you, Caitlyn.”
There’s a thumb stroking her face, gentle half moons across the dampness of her under-eyes. The fist around Vi’s heart squeezes, hard.
“Violet,” Their faces are so close, now, somehow, that Vi feels the puff of breath that carries her name against her mouth. “Please.”
Caitlyn is begging. Caitlyn is something wounded, something laid bare before her.
“Please,” She whispers, eyes wide. “Let me prove it.”
Vi stares at her. The naked desperation is painted on her careful features, the plain hurt, and she knows it mirrors her own expression. She feels as though she’s standing on the edge of a precipice, of an inevitable acceptance. She thinks about the nights she spent curled up in the dirt, years away from sober, and reached for someone who wasn’t there. She knows they both blame themselves. She knows there’s no clean way out. But here, now, curtained by the velvet canopy of Caitlyn’s bed, warm where the woman’s skin presses against hers, Vi realizes the fight really has punched out of her.
She only has the capacity to do the one thing she’s always seemed to, something instinctual and hardwired. Something written into the marrow of her bones long before she understood the weight of it. Vi draws a breath. She tilts her head up, down, just slightly. With a small, trembling quirk of her mouth, she forgives .
Caitlyn lets out one short, soft fog of breath. And then she leans forward, sliding her other hand under Vi’s shirt, cupping the bandage. Vi gasps, quiet and disbelieving, and trembles. She trembles, and trembles , and the heat of the palms against her skin threaten to overwhelm her.
Then Caitlyn parts her lips and presses her mouth, as gentle as the moonlight in her hair, against Vi’s.
It’s not like the kiss they shared months ago, buried deep underground and lying through their teeth. Caitlyn kisses her slow, open, mouth pliant and honest, and when Vi brings a shaking hand to cup her face she makes a broken little sound in the back of her throat. Caitlyn’s asking her a question. She’s begging for forgiveness in a new way.
Vi kisses her back. Answers her in her first language, with the simple finality of touch. She slides her free hand under Caitlyn’s jacket and pushes it off of her shoulders, letting it pool around her on the duvet, and shifts to press closer.
She’s afraid. She knows they both are, for what becomes of them now that this line has been crossed and what happens to all of them in the morning, but in this crystalized, private moment between their mouths, she sheds that weight. Her sister’s words flicker into her head, a desperate plea for self-consideration, and Vi tries to shed her guilt, too. It’s the least she can do.
“You’ve always been a fighter,” Caitlyn pauses to gasp, lips moving against the corner of Vi’s mouth. Her fingers twitch against the taut skin of Vi’s abdomen. “Please, Violet. Let me— let me take care of you.”
The anger that had coiled in Vi’s stomach all evening is tapering off, becoming instead a steadily blooming warmth, feathering out into her arms and her legs, into the trembling tips of her fingers. Those words warm her further, settling deep in her chest and making her eyes flutter shut briefly. She says, unsteadily, “Cait,” because she’s never let anyone do that before, doesn’t know if she’ll be any good at it. Her body has been a traitorous thing, in the past.
“I know.” Caitlyn murmurs, always so painfully observant. “But it’s—you deserve this. It’s the least I can offer to you. It’s the least of what you’ve earned.” She kisses the hinge of Vi’s jaw, feather-light, and the sensation punches a staggering exhale from Vi’s lungs. Her hand slips from Caitlyn’s cheek to the curve of her waist, settling to meet her other arm, and she smooths her palms down the woven fabric of her shirt. Her calloused fingers catch in the fibers, and she huffs another breath, letting herself settle into a feeling she hadn’t felt since Caitlyn had held her against that rusted hallway. A feeling she thought she’d let slip away for good.
Frighteningly, Vi realizes she just wants to feel that again. She wants to let this be enough. She wants to, for just one goddamned moment, be given something. Her fingers clench in the hem of Caitlyn’s sweater. Into the space between their mouths, she says, honestly, “Please.”
Sighing, Caitlyn leans away from Vi’s touch, and panic flares within her briefly. But Caitlyn is bending down and unbuckling her boots, shucking them off to the side of her bed, and standing to peel her shirt away from smooth, pale skin.
Vi stares up at her, breath leaving her open mouth in jagged bursts, as Caitlyn meets her gaze wearing an expression of open fondness, of want. She had tugged her bra off with the sweater, leaving her now half-naked and bathed in the glow of the moon, and Vi lets herself soak in every detail. There’s a mole above Caitlyn’s navel, two on the side of her ribs, beside her breast. She’s got much more to work with than Vi, and she quirks an eyebrow when Vi can’t seem to tear her eyes away from her chest. She steps back into Vi’s space, shifting to stand between her now-spread legs, and Vi runs her hands tentatively along the waistline of her slacks. She gazes up at Caitlyn as she brushes her belt buckle, and the woman shakes her head with a soft, fond smile.
“Not yet. I’d like to feel you, first. I’d like to do this for you.” Caitlyn glances away sheepishly. “If you’ll have me.”
“ Yes,” Vi breathes, leaning back slightly to let Caitlyn tower over her, as the taller woman invades her space once more. “Just, I’m usually—” she rakes a hand through her hair, frustrated, and Caitlyn leans down to kiss her again, one warm hand on each of Vi’s thighs.
“Vi,” she murmurs. “It’s okay. If you need to stop, we stop. But this–” she drags a hand up to Vi’s abdomen again, the unwounded side, and Vi’s stomach clenches at the feeling. “This feels good for me, too. Just… try to allow yourself to feel it. To feel this .” Caitlyn punctuates her words with another kiss, messy and open-mouthed, and Vi nods into it, makes a sound she can’t help, winding her arms around Caitlyn’s shoulders.
Caitlyn goes soft for the touch immediately, hips shifting as she half-straddles Vi’s lap, making soft noises of pleasure into their kiss. The instinctive, gnawing part of Vi licks into her mouth, and they both shudder at the meeting of their tongues. Still kissing her, still half in her lap, Caitlyn shifts them back into the center of the bed. She breaks away then, panting, and Vi palms at her hips desperately at the sight of her mouth, wet and shining above her.
Lips set in a small smile, Vi arches her back and undoes the buttons of her undershirt, pulling it swiftly and unceremoniously over her head and depositing it on the floor. Caitlyn gasps at the sight of her, and Vi feels her face heat under the scrutiny of that calculated stare.
“Handsome,” Caitlyn murmurs, almost like she had intended only to think it. Her cheeks are flushed, too, and she trails a hand from the center of Vi’s collarbone down between her breasts, stopping just short of the trail of fine pink hair that dusts her navel. Vi’s abs tense, and she breathes hard. She moves an arm up to brush a strand of hair out of her eyes and Caitlyn’s face flashes with interest, eyes trained on her forearm.
“On your stomach, just for a moment. I’d like to–” She’s quite flushed, and it takes Vi a moment to understand the reasoning. Smirking, she shifts backwards so she’s properly laying in Caitlyn’s bed, and turns to bury her face in familiar smelling pillows. She hears the way Caitlyn’s breath hitches above her, and she can’t help but smile softly against the fabric.
“Oh,” Caitlyn breathes, “You’re so…” and Vi feels careful fingers trace along the swirls and gears of her upper back. She shivers against the touch, gentle and calculated, and presses her face further into the pillows. They stay like that for a moment, Caitlyn silently appraising her, until her hands disappear from where they’ve been kneading at her shoulders. Vi turns her head just slightly to question her, but cuts off with a groan as Caitlyn starts to press wet, open-mouthed kisses to her skin instead. Vi shudders and relaxes into the bed, feels Caitlyn shift to straddle her lower back, and blunt nails drag lightly along the sides of her ribs.
“Cait,” Vi breathes. “Come on.”
Caitlyn only hums contentedly, mouthing along one of the columns that’s inked down Vi’s spine, fingers flexing at her waist. It makes Vi squirm, the position she’s in and how badly she wants to stay there, hips shifting gently against the mattress and against where Caitlyn is touching them. Eventually, finally, Caitlyn’s mouth retreats, and she presses lightly against Vi’s shoulder as she lifts onto her knees behind her. Getting the hint, Vi turns her back to the mattress, and is greeted with the sight of Caitlyn above her, knees bracketing Vi’s hips, face hot and eyes dark. She impatiently tears her hair tie out of her ponytail, letting her hair spill down her back and shoulders, much longer than Vi remembers it. Her mouth is wet, just slightly, and she’s panting a little bit. She looks… hungry.
Another moment stretches between them, Caitlyn’s eyes all over her body, Vi’s fixed pleadingly on her face. Slowly, Caitlyn reaches out to palm at Vi’s chest, thumbing over a nipple, as she lowers herself properly into Vi’s lap. The sudden pressure makes Vi twitch, hips seeking friction, and the two of them gasp in tandem as Vi’s hands fly to grip Caitlyn’s waist.
“Cait,” There’s an edge to Vi’s voice, now. A rasp that borders desperation.
Smiling, Caitlyn braces her free hand on the mattress, leaning down so that her hair falls to curtain their profiles. Her breath is hot against Vi’s mouth, and her pupils are dark and glassy.
“I want to make this good for you.” She squeezes Vi’s breast, making her gasp. “Will you show me?”
Caitlyn’s moving her hips in slow, gentle circles in Vi’s lap, the drag of the fabric between them only driving Vi’s heart to beat faster. She wants this, she needs it, and that fire envelops the guilt that tries to tangle itself around her chest. Caitlyn’s fingers, her mouth, the heat between her legs that presses close and hard against her, they’re the only things she wants to think about right now. She can’t make room for anything else.
Instead of doing something embarrassing, like gasping out yes, baby, please, Vi reaches up and cover’s Caitlyn’s smaller hand with her own, squeezing hard and making them both exhale shakily. Caitlyn’s looking at her hazily, their faces so close, but she jerks her attention down to watch as Vi pushes their hands lower, down the defined plane of her abdomen, settling at the band of her jeans. Caitlyn thumbs at the button of her fly, eyes flickering up to meet Vi’s once more as she bites at her bottom lip, and Vi nods.
Vi is transfixed by the attention Caitlyn pays to her every movement. She watches their conjoined hands as she worries her lower lip between gapped teeth, thumbing Vi’s fly open and gazing with rapt attention as she pushes her hand lower. Vi releases her fingers to unzip her jeans, giving Caitlyn a little more room to work with, and fists her hand in the dark denim as Caitlyn ghosts light, deft touches along the damp crease of her boxers.
Her back arches at the contact and she groans low in her throat, Caitlyn’s methodical work-up starting to really settle like electricity under her skin. Amazed that such a fleeting press of fingers could get her going like this. Unsure if she deserves it. Unable to look away.
Caitlyn eases off of her lap, moving just far back enough that she can catch a better angle, and Vi huffs and fumbles to tear her jeans down her thighs. Getting the message, Caitlyn bites off a grin and does the hard work for her.
“Gods,” She murmurs, once Vi is nearly naked beneath her. She pushes trembling thighs apart, and Vi is alarmed to find herself so sensitive, every brush of Caitlyn’s fingers driving her hips up helplessly.
She thumbs over a twisted, long-healed scar that cuts diagonally across Vi’s upper thigh, where busted piping had torn into her, she and her siblings scrambling to avoid being bagged by Enforcers for some petty theft. Her skin pimples with a chill at the touch.
“Look at you.” Caitlyn’s practically purring, color high on her cheeks and throat, and Vi huffs through her nose at the praise. Pinned beneath her, watching the reverence and hunger that paints her features, Vi feels almost shy. She doesn’t think anyone’s ever seen so much of her, and certainly not for this long.
But Caitlyn is undeterred, methodical, analytical, three things Vi’s always admired most about her. She takes her time working her fingers gently across the inside of Vi’s thighs, thumb pressing at where dark hair curls against the seam of her boxers, watching for any hitch in Vi’s breath or outlying push of her hips. Eventually, she seems satisfied, and hooks her thumbs into the band of her boxers. She gazes up at Vi for permission, and the blaze of their eye contact through her long lashes tears another sound from Vi’s throat.
Nodding, she lifts her hips, lets Caitlyn wordlessly slide her boxers off and drop them to the floor.
When Caitlyn’s gaze returns to her, it holds fast to the pink hair between her thighs, and Vi watches her lips part hungrily. There’s an authority that rises to her surface here, a frame of mind Vi has rarely seen her in and only ever imagined her showing in this context. It’s exhilarating. It makes her hips cant upwards on the bed. Caitlyn tracks the movement intently.
“Show me,” She says, not tearing her gaze away from the mess Vi is surely making of the sheets. “How you like it.” Her assertion wavers, briefly, as she adds a sheepish, “Please.”
Vi is helpless to that lilt in her voice, the polished softness of her accent. She bites at her bottom lip and does as she’s asked.
Stomach tense and head swimming, she brings the hand Caitlyn has rested against her knee to the curls at the very inside of her thigh, holds it there just briefly, until she feels Caitlyn’s nails scratch impatiently at the soft skin.
“Start me off slow,” Vi says, cheeks heating with the admission, and she watches Caitlyn’s gaze darken as she nods.
Caitlyn’s middle finger presses against her, where she’s already so wet and ready, and her spine bows as the contact shoots through her like lightning. She begins to drag slow, methodical circles around Vi’s clit, lip caught between her teeth as she watches for her reactions, and Vi has to screw her eyes shut against the weight of her pleasure, against the ache that makes her want to beg for more. “Oh,” she breathes, and she feels Caitlyn lean into her space a little more.
“Good?” Caitlyn’s voice is rough and affected. When Vi opens her eyes, she sees the open starvation in her gaze.
“Good, yeah, yes,”
The last affirmation dissolves into a whine as Caitlyn increases her pressure, changes her angle, does something with the pad of her finger that leaves her keening. Vi winds an arm around Caitlyn’s shoulder, holding her close, and the woman groans and turns her face to press an open-mouthed kiss to the flexed muscle of Vi’s bicep.
“I thought about this, always, it was always—” Caitlyn grits her teeth against Vi’s skin, hissing, working her harder, and Vi gasps out a desperate breath.
“You’re so good, love, you feel so good for me.” Caitlyn’s eyes are glassy and half-lidded, murmuring the praise into her flesh. Vi groans low in her throat as her finger slips down to press at her entrance, the two of them shuddering at the moisture there.
Vi tightens her hold on Caitlyn and rears up to kiss her, hips working against her hand, all furious teeth and tongue. There’s a bright, hot welling inside of her, both between her legs and in her heart, forgiveness and desperation and an unnameable, unignorable wanting. She’d be stupid to tamp it down any longer. She just wants to have this for herself, just this, just Caitlyn. Just here and now.
“Your mouth,” she gasps, threading a hand into Caitlyn’s soft, dark hair, making a fist. “Please.”
Caitlyn whines, high and pretty, and settles back on her knees between Vi’s thighs. Vi bends with her, keeping her hand fisted, willing Caitlyn to stay close. Caitlyn’s eyes flutter closed as she bends low, smoothing Vi’s thighs further apart, and Vi only has time to miss her fingers for a moment before Caitlyn presses a deft, practiced tongue to her cunt and destroys any semblance of reservation remaining within her.
“Fuck,” Vi gasps, “Fuck.”
Oh, she’s done this before; Caitlyn works her roughly and precisely, taking advantage of her catalogue of Vi’s reactions to her touch, holding her open with one hand and licking her long and slow. Vi would like to be impressed with her methodical approach to pleasure, but she’s too busy curling her toes in the sheets and biting at her free hand to keep quiet.
She loses herself in the unceasing waves of sensation, the electricity that zips through her with every push and pull of Caitlyn’s mouth, grinding helplessly against the flat of her tongue. When a particularly blinding pulse of arousal has her yanking Caitlyn closer by the roots of her hair, the moan that reverberates between her thighs is so broken and obscene that Vi feels herself drip onto her sheets.
“Caitlyn,” she breathes at the ceiling, a coiling within her like a hot iron. “Cait, baby.” The words spill from Vi’s mouth before she can stop them, lost in the tide of her pleasure, but they make Caitlyn groan and writhe against her skin nonetheless.
Caitlyn breaks her mouth away from Vi with a sound that borders on pornographic, and Vi aches at the sight of her, the lower half of her face slick and shining. Caitlyn is panting, staring up at Vi with brazen arousal, and before Vi can open her mouth to beg for more, she presses a finger against her entrance again.
“Can I,” she says, and her voice is ruined, so coarse it doesn’t come out as a question. Good. Vi doesn’t want it to. She pitches her hips forward and sinks down onto Caitlyn’s finger wordlessly, throat tipping back as she braces against the sensation, and she dimly hears Caitlyn whimper.
“Another,” Vi breathes. “Come on, give it to me.”
She’s too far gone to feel shameful. Especially not when the tightening of her fist and the command rip a broken little sound from Caitlyn’s lips as she surges to obey. Guided by Vi’s grip on her hair and by her own determination, she slips a second finger inside of Vi and ducks her head to suck at her clit, working her fingers gently.
Vi abruptly loses the space to form words. Caitlyn’s fucking good at this, knows just how to coax the pleasure from Vi with her fingers, knows just how to find the root of her and stoke it, tongue lapping at her greedily all the while. Vi can only prop herself up on one elbow and take it, looking down her nose to watch Caitlyn eat her, head bobbing against the fist in her hair.
She’s panting into the darkness of Caitlyn’s bedroom, skin slick with sweat, whole body tensed in anticipation. Caitlyn crooks her fingers and she groans brokenly, as blue eyes flash up to meet hers.
Slowly, Caitlyn’s mouth retreats, fingers still working Vi to pieces, and she tilts her head up to hold the eye contact. She’s breathing hard, the reactions to tugs in her hair full-bodied, and she’s watching Vi with an open reverence. Like she can’t believe she’s here, that Vi is here. That makes two of them; silhouetted in the moonlight Caitlyn could almost be a ghost, another hazy, drunken hallucination. The thought closes like a vice grip around Vi’s heart, but then a hand on her thigh smoothes up her abdomen to grip at the soft skin just below her breast.
“Violet,” Caitlyn whispers, the syllables gently slurred from overuse of her jaw. “I need it, please,” her fingers brush that spot inside of her again, the one that makes her hips surge against the bed, and Vi slips her hand free from Caitlyn's hand to hold her jaw. Unthinking, she pushes her thumb against the seam of Caitlyn’s lips, and whines when she takes Vi’s thumb into her mouth. Eyes fluttering closed, she nips at the flesh of her knuckle and laves at the underside of her thumb, as though she’s got something to prove. Her fingers drive deeper within Vi, spurred on by her desperate moans, and Caitlyn’s eyes flicker open to flash something dangerous.
There’s a wave gathering within Vi, cresting slowly and surely, and when she holds Caitlyn’s gaze it’s a storm-surge of honesty. The regret, the longing, the feeling, pooling unbidden and unfettered in the eyes of the woman below her, it punches the breath from her. She frees her thumb from between Caitlyn’s lips and props herself up on both elbows, teeth grit, hips shifting rhythmically to take Caitlyn deeper. She wants, foolishly, to open her mouth and forgive Caitlyn for everything, to absolve her of every sin, but she knows that work has yet to be done.
She can start here, though, in the pleading of her gaze, the soft, slick bow of her lips, the rhythmic movements of her wrist. She coaxes sounds from Vi that she hadn’t thought herself previously capable of, small and high and broken, with every press of her deft fingers. Vi feels the rearing of the wave low in her stomach, deep in her heart.
“ Oh, Cait, fuck,” she’s run out of words, reduced to nothing but her sensitive flesh, the piercing gaze of her lover. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Vi’s hips are jerking erratically, mouth slack with an urgent need.
Caitlyn looks her right in the eyes. Holds her, frozen, in this moment. She presses her thumb to Vi’s swollen clit and crooks her fingers just right and hisses, “Vi, take it.”
Vi takes it. She falls apart.
She comes with a groan poured through bared teeth, whole body bent in one long line of tension, throat bared. Caitlyn works her hard and sure through the ripple of the aftershock, until she’s gasping and falling back against the pillows, whole body trembling around the reflections of molten pleasure. She gasps something like yes, something like please, although there’s nothing left to beg for, not now. Eventually she’s shuddering and pulling weakly at Caitlyn’s busy hand, and can’t help the high, overstimulated whine she lets out when Caitlyn slips her fingers free.
A soft, steady weight falls over her, Caitlyn still in her slacks, pressing the feverish heat of her body close to Vi’s cooling skin. Vi wraps trembling arms around her, muscling them both onto their sides, and feels Caitlyn exhale shakily against her throat. She presses her face close, tasting the salt on Caitlyn’s shoulder, closes her eyes, breathes. There is no wave of guilt. There is no shoe to drop. It’s only this, only now. The silence wrapped around them is forgiving, and Vi lets it linger for a while, slowing her stuttering heartbeat.
“Caitlyn,” Vi whispers, finally, when the words return to her. She feels the woman tense in her arms.
“Thank you.”
There’s another drawn-out, shaken puff of breath against her neck.
“We’ll make this right.” She's not sure why she says it, not sure what compels her to reassure Caitlyn in this moment, but she knows she’s done working through things alone. She’s done running.
Caitlyn leans back, eyes wide, mouth parted. Her hair is mussed and spills like ink down her shoulders, and she splays a warm hand against Vi’s sternum.
“Whatever happens— whatever greets us tomorrow. Vi, you’re not doing it alone. I’m here.” her hand presses down, just enough pressure to make Vi’s eyes flutter. “I’m here.” Caitlyn’s eyes are suppliant.
The moon, high in the sky, casts a shadow along her face. Vi sees the lines there, the hurt, the months spent chasing an impossible goal, an insubstantial distraction. And she understands .
She wraps her hand around Caitlyn’s, both of their palms to her chest, and squeezes.
“I know.” Vi whispers. I know.