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In the months after - well, in the after, they decompress, they heal. The skin grows back over Violet’s knuckles, Caitlyn learns to calibrate to where things like doorjambs or chairs actually are. More importantly, Vi settles into her life. It’s shocking and fascinating to adjust to; Cait has never lived with anyone but her parents which wasn’t really comparable. She’d imagined it of course, girlish, soap-bubble daydreams that had nothing on the warm animal reality of another woman living in your space. She had never been in love, never really lusted after someone like this and then had them within arms reach constantly. It’s more distracting than she expected.
I.
In the spring her father insists on taking both of them on a shooting trip to the old country club. When Caitlyn extends his invitation in the kitchen, the two of them sleepily jostling each other for coffee, Vi hesitates before she accepts. Then follows through in the hesitation, asking what you even do at this place, are they gonna just go kill things for fun? with a tiny wrinkle in her nose that makes Caitlyn chug a searing throatful of her coffee to try and deal with the bubble of giddiness in her chest. Vi is so pretty in her kitchen, edged with pale early morning light, barefoot and in briefs.
“Non-functional violence only, promise,” she says, clearing her throat, “we use clay targets.”
She cradles her own cup and leans on the counter to watch Vi down her first cup, black and steaming and in one long pull like she’s taking medicine, before making the second the way she actually likes it. Sugar, no cream, sweet and dark. Cait rolls the second hand memory of the taste of it around on her tongue.
“It’s not a guided tour of Undercity, but I spent a lot of time there as a child, a lot of good time. I’d like to show it to you.”
Violet’s face softens and she hides a little smile behind her coffee cup.
“I’d like that.”
Violet ends up being a pleasingly skilled amateur shot and tries to slip out from under the compliments from both of them with a lopsided little shrug. “It’s just hand-eye coordination, I gotta know where my fists are going, right?”
Cait’s father beats her to it, clapping Vi’s shoulder over her jacket. “Take the compliment, Vi,” he says, “it’s good to be able to share something you enjoy with someone, that’s all.”
Violet stills and Cait sees that little bit of tension drain out of her shoulders.
“Okay. Thanks, then.”
It’s a slightly more frustrating exercise for Cait - she still hasn’t adjusted completely to the changes in her vision. But it’s not the complete disaster she’d worried it would be, and she does well enough on her usual course to take the sense of accomplishment and stop to join her father inside the lodge before she gives herself a migraine. It’s starting to drizzle anyway. She blinks at the warm dazzle of light when she steps inside, fingers still flexing through the satisfying buzz of recoil that’s settled in her joints and tendons. It’s been too long since she did this purely for pleasure. She’s only just spotted Vi across the hall when her father ropes her into his conversation with one of the only other people Cait has seen here at this time of year, a man who, much to Cait’s dread, immediately addresses her as “little Caitlyn Kiramman.”
“Archibald, so good to see you again.” She drags the smile of a daughter from polite society up from somewhere and dusts it off.
“Come to correct my form, Commander?” Violet says, soft and mocking, not ten minutes later when Cait has fled to her with the excuse of checking on her guest rather than endure being called ‘young lady’ one more time.
She’s in her shirtsleeves, messing with the little toy pop rifles, comically undersized cradled in Vi’s big hands, aiming it down the miniature range populated by brightly painted targets of cute woodland critters all with bullseyes for bellies. It’s meant for the children too small for actual weapons; Caitlyn found it deeply insulting as a child herself and now as an adult hilariously inappropriate.
“Hm,” Caitlin takes the bait, tilts the noise up dismissively, changing tack to circle her. “You’re not giving me much to work with, but I suppose I could give you some pointers.”
She takes a quick furtive look over her shoulder to make sure her father isn’t paying them any attention, then shoves her knee between Vi’s thighs from behind and kicks her feet out to shoulder’s width apart. Violet sucks in a sharp breath and her knuckles go white on the toy gun. Cait steps up behind her and slips her fingers through the belt loops on Violet’s pants to pull her hips into a proper perpendicular stance, then grips her biceps, tugging Vi out of her slouch and into alignment with her hips. The muscles under Cait’s fingers bunch as Vi deliberately rolls her shoulders back against Cait’s breasts, crushed up against her in their position.
A sharp giggle sticks in Cait’s throat at the ridiculousness - what a silly, terrible idea it is to do this standing in the middle of a mostly empty room. Then she frowns disapprovingly when she realizes the butt of the toy gun is loose and off-kilter against Violet’s bad shoulder. What she’s holding is barely a step up from a wooden block toy, but still. She reaches around to yank it in, straight and firm, and gets a lovely little noise when the worn wood digs into muscle there.
Her arm position isn’t terrible, but - Caitlyn takes another furtive check that her dad is still deep in his conversation with Archibald, then lays her cheek on Vi’s slick clean hair, smelling like rain and Cait’s shampoo. She runs her palms down Vi’s arms, cups her supporting elbow and adjusts it down instead of winging out, then adjusts that hand so it sits further back on the stock. She rests her firing arm fully over Vi’s, shifting and flexing until the ghost of the stock against her shoulder and the phantom eyeline down the barrel just feels right. She can feel the rapid unsteadiness of Vi’s breathing against her body and hear the dry click of her throat when she swallows, staring fixedly down range at a pink, bobble-eyed…Cait isn’t sure. A rat, maybe? They’re not very good cartoon animals.
Finally she slips her index finger under Violet’s and flicks it up to rest on the trigger guard. “Really now, I figured you’d at least get the finger position right, Violet,” she says softly, then steps back and folds her arms to admire her handiwork.
The hot red back of Vi’s neck really completes it.
Cait can’t resist - after one last check to make sure they’re not being watched, she gives Violet a quick, hard smack on the ass and tosses an “acceptable, soldier” over her shoulder as she walks back across the hall. If she doesn’t retrieve her father now, this will be a three hour conversation, and Caitlyn would like to get home sooner than later.
The door clicks shut and there’s a long anticipatory beat before Cait feels movement behind her, tries to dodge, and gets swept straight off her feet, Vi’s arms around her middle making the laugh burst out of her, the first proper belly laugh she can remember having in weeks.
“-in front of your father, Cait!”
“Oh, he wasn’t even paying attention. And I am not an excellent instructor?” Cait says, twisting in Vi’s arms until she can wrap her legs around her waist. She can see it derail Vi’s train of thought, her eyes drifting down to Cait’s thighs around her waist, her bunched up skirt. Cait laces her fingers behind Vi’s neck and arches her back just a little, to help.
“For sure, cupcake, I’m competition ready now,” Vi says with a distinct lack of heat. Or with a different kind of heat.
Cait sighs happily as Vi’s grip shifts to her ass and she starts to walk through the house. She’s seen it in action so many times but it’s still a thrill just how strong Vi is. Cait runs her hands up the flex of Vi’s biceps, over her shoulders and up into her hair, fuzzy against Cait’s palm. She needs a fresh trim. Right now even that’s a turn on - how Violet has stuck around long enough to have to trim her hair a few times over. Proof that not everything broke bad.
Vi drops her unceremoniously on the bed and Cait settles in, toes off her flats and stretches, enjoying Violet staring at her like a meal she can’t decide where to start with. There’s no point in trying to rush her anyway. It was a constant delight to find out that impatient, impulsive Violet ate pussy like she had all the time in the world and no amount of heels on her back or nails on her scalp would hurry her. Barring outside circumstances, Vi would do exactly as she liked until she felt she had fulfilled whatever criteria for Cait’s orgasm she had in her head. Cait sinks into the anticipation with a happy sigh as Vi hauls her ass to the end of the bed and rucks her skirt up around her hips.
Sweaty and still trying to settle her breathing, Cait reaches down and tugs gently on the little lock of hair that never does stay out of Vi’s face.
“Take your pants off and come up here.”
Vi wiggles around briefly below the line of the bed, then plants her hands on the bed and pushes herself up, cheeks and jaw shining wet. While Caitlyn is distracted by that and by the deep dimples of her trapezius, the freckles on her shoulders, she deliberately wipes one side of her messy face on Cait’s skirt, leaving a wide wet stain.
Cait yelps in outrage and drags her horrid, laughing brat of a girlfriend up by her hair and one arm.
“Do not ruin my clothes!”
“Make me,” Vi says, nonsensically, hovering over Cait on her elbows and knees, her eyes bright and happy and a breathless edge to her laugh.
Cait puts both her hands back in that overgrown hair and firmly turns her head, leaning up so she can lick slow and deliberate down the still messy line of Vi’s jaw. The tang of her own cunt mixed with sweat floods her mouth and Vi, now frozen over her, makes a series of soft, round noises as Cait kisses her clean.
Satisfied that her point is made, Cait lays back and smiles sweetly up at Vi, who is a perfect picture with that hollowed out expression of wonder.
“If you wanted your face clean you just had to ask, darling,” she says.
A hard, incredulous breath punches out of Vi and she shifts up to brush her thumb against the corner of Cait’s mouth
“You are something else, Commander Kiramman.”
Cait reaches up to drag a pillow down under her head.
“Shut up and sit on my face already.”
II.
“Went all the way to failure today,” Violet says, appearing in their bedroom door where Cait is on the bed, cross referencing.
Violet has been working on her upper body to compensate for that weak shoulder, the old injury that stiffens up on her constantly. Cait looks up, blinking away lines and lines of tiny text to see her sweat drenched and flushed down to the neat tight dip of her navel, finally having been stopped in her efforts by simple muscle exhaustion rather than by weakness or pain. Cait sweeps her gaze over her.
The upper body workout has left her defined and swollen under her skin, flush with prostaglandins, white blood cells flooding to the microtears in the muscle, building Violet back up stronger. She pulls off her sports bra with a care that speaks of soreness but no real pain, grabs her own elbows and stretches out her latissimus until the bands of muscle tremble and give, smoothing out the ladder of her ribcage. Her sides have finally filled back out, no more half-starved definition to her abdominals. She gives Cait a tired, triumphant little smile, rubbing at the marks left by the elastic.
Cait no longer remembers what the books she’s holding are even about. She tosses them off the side of their bed and dumbly hooks a foot around Vi’s calf, giving a sharp tug towards her.
“Hey, wha-”
Cait is already dragging her tongue up the sweet center groove of Vi’s abdomen to where her workout has pumped her up to the point where she’s more pec than tit. Cait gives her breast a fond mouthing kiss then - gently - scrapes her teeth over the swollen muscle.
“-ahht - ohh.”
The wounded little noise draws Cait’s eye up. Vi’s lower lip is drawn into her mouth, brows drawn down but she brings her hand up to the back of Cait’s neck. Good. She puts her attention back to her work and opens her mouth again to suck along where the ridge of muscle gives to the soft weight of Violet’s breast. The dense tang of salt coats her tongue and this close, the smell of her - god she’s almost got her nose in Vi’s armpit - spit floods Cait’s mouth so hard and fast it escapes the corner of the mouth and slips down Violet’s ribs.
“Oh,” Violet says again, big hand gentle on the back of her head, fingers threading into her hair.
Cait has to squeeze her eyes shut against the all-over throb of her body and the urge to sink her teeth into Violet right up to the gums. The urge isn’t to hurt. Cait just wants to eat her with perfect, starving incoherence.
Caitlyn does her best; she eats her way across Vi’s breasts, scrapes her teeth down her ribs and mouths back up the brachial vein standing out on the tender underside of Vi’s arm. Violet lets herself be pushed around, arranged so Cait can put her mouth on whatever part her fevered brain decides it wants next. She shouts and her hand goes to a fist in Cait’s hair when she sinks her teeth hard into the meat of her trapezius, and Cait pulls back with a gasp. Violet stares back at her with the same kind of stunned hunger Cait feels on her own face.
“Good noise. Don’t stop.”
“Good,” Cait repeats, dumbly.
“Feeling like a piece of meat here,” Vi says, voice wobbling, getting her hands batted away when she tries to help Cait yank her loose gym shorts and underwear off, tonguing down the defined vee of her hip.
“Who says you aren’t?” Cait says, glancing up, and squeezes her ass as punctuation.
“Your piece of meat,” Vi says, and goes easily when Cait pushes her down on her belly.
Cait straddles Violet’s ass, takes her wrists in her hands, and stares down as she slowly pulls Violet’s hands up over her head. There is a sheet of muscle on either side of her spine that goes from her lower back up to disappear under the intricacies of shoulder and neck muscles. The variegated blacks of tattoo ink shift and pull into the dips and lines, warping the buildings and gears, and some terrible greedy thing still has Caitlyn by the throat. Her skin is cold and tingling; everything else is feverish hot. She wants to come on Violet’s back - the idea is so stupid, how would that even work. The hot animal of her brain doesn’t care.
A combination of rubbing herself against the tight flex of Vi’s ass and her own fingers on her clit ends up working beautifully - for both of them, with Vi’s head turned over her shoulder at what can’t be a comfortable angle to watch, wide-eyed, as Cait uses her to get off. It takes almost no time for Cait to finish, probably over-enthusiastic of her, she thinks, wincing as she removes her fingers from her slightly battered feeling clit.
“Fuck, Cait. I can feel your come dripping down my ass.”
Cait’s breath leaves her all in a rush and without thinking she reaches out and paints her dripping fingers up the valley of Violet’s back, up the main structure of the tattoo. Violet makes a hysterical noise and nearly unseats Cait when she half twists around, eyes huge in her shocked face.
“Did you just…” Her gaze darts from Cait’s face to her wet hand to her own back then back before she drops back to the mattress with a boneless bounce, arms folded around her head so only the pink shock of her hair is visible.
“Do it again,” she says, muffled.
It’s a long time before Vi gets her shower.
III.
Violet eyes the toy with such suspicion that Cait has to laugh.
“It’s not going to bite you.”
“I know that,” Violet says, not looking away from where she’s turning it in her hands. Cait considers her from her seat on the bed, naked, leg swinging idly as she watches Violet contemplate a glass dildo like it’s a live viper. Though it’s probably less the dildo part - that’s familiar enough - and more the extra bit that curves back and up and ends in a fat little bulb colored a wavering watercolor match to Violet’s hair. That’s new.
Caitlyn considers the little standoff in front of her, then puts just enough condescension in her tone to set Violet off. “My fingers are bigger than that.”
Violet’s head jerks up, nose scrunching as she scowls, but the beautiful thing about this is it works even when Vi knows she’s being baited.
“Fine,” she bites off, “we’ll try it, but it’s your fault if I suck in bed because of it.”
“Not really a problem you ever suffer from.”
“Yeah, don’t try and butter me up after that,” Vi mutters as Cait scoots back onto the bed, watching intently as Vi slides the toy into the harness then into herself. She should have had Violet come up on the bed first, so she had a better view.
Violet toys with her for much longer than usual, clearly distracted and feeling out the new sensations as the bulk and weight of the solid glass in her responded every time she glided the dildo almost frictionlessly over Cait’s wet cunt.
Cait feels like she’s been very patient for a very long time and digs her fingers into the meat of Violet’s ass and drags them up, sharp and hard.
“Stop pussyfootting around and please fuck me already!”
Violet lurches forward, hips hunching and the dildo catches with a sharp unpleasantness before sliding in. Violet’s breath leaves her on a high-pitched, frantic noise as her fist impacts the headboard with the sharp snap of structural damage. She stares over Cait at it, eyes owlish wide with shock, like someone else had thrown the punch with her arm
“Oops?” the word breaks wetly in the middle
“Now, Violet,” Cait says, full at least, but Vi isn’t moving.
“God, fuck, you’re impatient, this is so distracting,” Violet says, shaking her hand out and hooking her arms under Cait’s legs to press them up and back.
The toy shifts in her, with them, and some of the sizzling tension in Cait melts away. She relaxes into the familiar crush, breathing out slow and stroking her hands up Violet’s arms until she can run her fingers into the shorn fuzz of her hair.
“Hi,” Cait says, smiling, tucking pink hair behind Violet’s ear.
“Happy now, are we?” The words would probably sound more biting if Vi could stop smiling dopily back at her.
“Could be happier,” Cait says, dragging a heel up Violet’s back.
“Always something with you, isn’t it?” Violet says, eyes sparkling as she shifts her knees wider, her fingers digging into the meat of Cait’s ass as she draws back and pushes all the way back in, the muscle of her sides flexing against the insides of Cait’s thighs.
Violet makes a lovely noise she usually only makes with Cait’s fingers in her, looking down at where the toy is in both of them in shock.
“Oh fuck.”
Cait had never doubted when Vi told her she liked doing this even though it wasn’t really physically focussed on her. She just also thought it was her job and privilege to make Violet feel as good as possible whenever she could, thus, this custom order. And it was worth every penny: there was a hard red flush from Vi’s throat to her belly and sweat broke out fast on her shoulders and chest. She fucked more selfishly, hauling Cait into different positons that clearly felt better to her, pushing her around and grabbing at her with a greed that was a turn on for Cait that went far beyond the slick heavy glide of glass in her cunt.
After, she drops back on her heels, her hands still on Cait’s knees to ground herself, panting, a glorious mess, the pink curls of her pubes frothed with wetness from both of them. She glistens from hip to hip, up her belly and down her thighs. The sheet is a total loss. She pulls the toy off, out, and her cunt is a beautiful swollen bloom, long strings of wet connecting her to the drenched glass until she tosses it harness and all to the end of the bed and crawls up the bed to collapse on Caitlyn who lifts her chin to let Vi tuck her head under chin.
“Okay, so. You win, it rules.”
“I do always have the best ideas,” Cait concedes, finger-combing the damp hair off the back of Vi’s neck.
There’s a long sweet minute where they both catch their breath. Several minutes. Cait is going to be feeling this one for days.
“But ‘pussyfooting’, really?” She can feel Vi’s grin as she taps air quotes against her skin.
Cait snorts, giggles, and drops her arm over her eye to hide her face.
“Stop.”
“No, I love it, it’s like a pun but even worse.”
“Ugh. I’m returning the toy.”
“You can’t, it’s mine, I love it now.”
IIII.
Cait has been in a terrible mood this week, one of those where everything inside and out of her scrapes like sandpaper for reasons she can’t logic out, and she’s trying to make up for being a pill when Violet makes some toothless comment about Cait liking her better fresh off a workout.
“I’m sorry, ‘gross’? Who was it that once spit on me in front of a tent full of Noxians?” she says, and smacks Vi’s shoulder just too hard to be playful.
There’s a beat where Vi looks startled and annoyed, and Cait jerks back in her hold, nearly as confused as Vi as to where that came from. Then another beat, drawn out, where Violet’s head ticks to the side and her expression unknots into something clinical, curious, and Cait is being sized up in a new way. There’s something cold and tight stopping up her throat.
“Third time this week you’ve brought that up,” she says mildly.
“No, it isn’t. It’s nothing! Stop it.” Even to her own ears it’s weak, shrill.
“Nope,” Violet says easily, popping the p.
The sudden wolfish - that is not a smile - baring of teeth is all the warning Cait gets before Violet grapples her. There’s an all-over roll of muscle Cait could never dream of replicating as she twists them and tosses Cait to the bed roughly enough to catch her on the bounce.
Violet looms up over her, shoulders bunched, kneeling on Cait’s thighs as she gathers her wrists in one hand and pins them over her head. Her eyes roam Cait’s face with bright calculation as her other hand threads gently into Cait’s hair to grip her hard at the scalp. Her teeth are still showing, tongue pressing against the backs of them from the dark wet inside of her mouth and a frightening vertigo of anticipation swoops in Cait as she jerks ineffectively at the hold on her wrists.
“I’ll say sorry after.”
“Vi, wha-”
The wad of spit hits her cheek.
Cait’s brain checks out completely and without fanfare. Something brutally hot and vicious slams into her stomach and claws its way up her throat like panic, the throb of her cunt tipping sweetly into actual pain. A series of awful noises spill out of her as she fights Violet’s hold clumsily, but there’s no give at all in her grip.
Violet leans in but veers her mouth away from Caitlyn’s gasping mouth at the last minute. She kisses a sweet line under Cait's eye, then the tip of nose, then swipes her lips down and wipes her spit down into Cait’s mouth. Cait makes more terrible, punched out noises and sucks helplessly at Vi’s mouth, her abs flexing uselessly, grinding against nothing.
“That not enough, piltie princess? You wanna hump my leg too?” Violet is so close, her voice is so soft, and Cait is so cracked open and raw.
Cait tries to say please several times but her voice doesn’t work properly and she can only get half the word out at once. Eventually Vi snorts, shifts her legs on Cait’s and shoves one still clothed knee up between Caitlyn’s bare thighs.
“Go on then.”
Caitlyn does so shamelessly, and she’s so wet the cloth doesn’t even chafe against her. Violet keeps her strung up in her grip, brushing her lips across Caitlyn’s face randomly, softly, not quite kisses. She waits until Cait is close, her ears ringing, all higher thought still checked out, before pulling back - just enough for Cait to see the silver gleam of her eyes before spitting right on her lower lip.
Caitlyn makes a shrill noise, comes and bursts into tears, thighs locking around Vi’s, teeth sunk into her lower lip, sucking. Vi’s hands gentle all at once and she gathers her up as Cait sobs her way through the aftershocks, then just sobs.
“Shh shh shh, easy. Easy, baby.” Vi finger combs through her snarled hair, soothes the shakes out of her shoulders, and lets Cait drain herself of - of whatever that was.
“You did so good, you were gorgeous.” Caitlyn tries to scoff, chokes on it instead when another sob overrides it and just shakes her head. Violet rubs circles on her back, soothes down her spine, her hands strong and warm.
“Hey, don’t try to call me a liar, I know what I see when I look at you, pretty girl.”
It’s such a stupid thing to be called right now, in her state, what she just did - that a giggle forces its way out, breaks up the brutal rhythm of the sobs in her lungs. Cait takes a deep breath, another, until her ribs don’t shake with it.
“Stop, you’re ridiculous.” She wipes her nose and Vi gently swipes her tear tracks away until Caitlyn takes her hand and kisses the scarred knuckles. “You don’t have to say sorry,” she says, “I don’t - I’m -” She takes a deep breath. “Thank you.”
“Whatever you need. Anytime.” Violet’s eyes are luminous in the dark, so impossibly beautiful.
“I didn’t even do anything for you,” Cait deflects. She looks away, tries to sit up, prevented by Vi simply refusing to budge the arm around her waist.
“Now who’s ridiculous,” Vi says softly.
V.
Caitlyn has more or less accepted that feeling this way about Violet is just going to be her state of existence. Her girlfriend is the most gorgeous, stubborn, big-hearted asshole she’s ever met, so now it’s Cait’s lot to power through the simply ridiculous, random attacks of attraction that come with that.
Though one long night where they don’t have anything looming the next morning, they do actually find their limit.
“Ow,” Violet squeaks, adorably, her hips flinching up with a lovely pull of abs as she forgets her overworked body and tries to grind on Cait’s thigh again. She topples sideways onto her back and Cait reflexively reaches out until her knuckles are pressed to Violet’s hip, right by her own teeth marks on her ass.
“I think,” she has to clear her throat. “that we have actually fucked outselves out.”
“No, come on, I'm too young to be a two-pump chump,” Vi whines, still sprawled limply on her back.
Cait giggles, watching her lovely profile, her open and relaxed expression. “That is not what that means.”
“It is now,” Violet says with a flap of her hand, blinking slow and heavy as she speaks.
Cait looks down at the holy mess of both of them. Violet’s nipples and areola are puffy red from attention, and apparently at some point Cait had decided both of them needed to be ringed with bite marks, a decision she stands by. The insides of Cait’s thighs are marked by Vi’s mouth and teeth to the point that it’s going to have to be pants only for at least a few days if she doesn’t want to chafe. There are faint scratches crosshatched on Vi’s ribs, and almost certainly more on her back and ass. Sweat, spit, and come are drying in whorls across their skin.
It’s amazing, and now that the fog has lifted, itchy.
“Okay. Up. Showers,” Cait says firmly, pushing herself upright to the protest of her thighs and abdominals.
“Hhghf,” Vi says in protest, but she staggers to her feet when Cait hauls on her arm.
A bath is tempting in theory but too much effort right now, so she turns the shower on and Vi trails behind her into the steam and heat.
“You know, when you walked away from me that night, I came in here to clean up and had such a - a sulking little tantrum over you,” she says, dragging a sudsy washcloth over Vi’s shoulders and back.
Vi’s face, tipped forward against her shoulder, does an odd little convulsion between humor and grief. Caitlyn drops a brief kiss on the nick in her eyebrow.
“I moved through the world so easily, so ignorantly, and then you showed up, turned my world all around and then rejected me. You left me in a proper state.” She laughs fondly. It feels like decades ago, a universe that had seemed so much simpler. Vi just watches her curiously, grey eyes clear, no little worry furrow between them.
Caitlyn nudges her around then kneels carefully at her feet - with barely a wobble, victory. Violet’s breath doesn’t hitch, but she takes a quick little in and out breath as Caitlyn goes back to cleaning her up
“You know, even if we - if we hadn’t -,” Caitlyn cannot say ‘come together again’ right now, “ - seen each other after that week, I would still be so glad to have met you. I didn’t know anything before I met you.”
She sets Vi’s foot back on the tiles, suds running down around her toes and whirling towards the drain. A simplification to be sure, but she means it. She’d seen all in black and white, been so sure of her own narrow opinions.
She’d jumped from girl to girl and not really cared that much about any of them. Not that she was some kind of cad, it had just been fun, a form of exercise almost. Utterly unrecognizable next to what Violet does to her.
She’s wringing the soap from the washcloth when Vi reaches down and cups her cheek. Caitlyn kisses her palm and looks up, but Vi is looking at the wall, brows drawn down in determined effort.
“I’d be dead, I think,” she says. Caitlyn covers Vi’s hand with her own and leans into it. Vi opens her mouth, closes it. Shakes her head with a wry little twist of her mouth and says “Yeah, no point in going there. It’s all bad and it didn’t happen. So fuck it.”
She rolls her shoulders back, setting them against whatever awful future she’d just looked into. She smiles down at Cait, fingers curving along her jaw, thumb brushing her cheek.
“I guess I owe you one, cupcake.”
Cait shifts her grip to Violet’s wrist and Violet pulls her up. She needs the help - kneeling was a horrible idea when her legs barely work. She presses them together as close as she can, Violet warm and soft and slick against her.
There's that look, Cait can’t name what exactly it is, a tension around her eyes and in the corners of her mouth that creeps back in quiet moments. A look that says Violet still expects this all to be snatched away from her. That happiness wasn’t dealt in her life’s cards and this woman with the biggest, softest heart Cait’s ever encountered understands fundamentally that her place in life is to be a fist or a shield that facilitates everyone else’s happiness. Cait sees it, knows it, hates it and her own complicity in it. And one day she’ll get rid of it completely.
“Violet, you don’t owe me a god damned thing,” Caitlyn says, and kisses her.