Chapter Text
Cait barely has time to duck and cover her head from that final, horrible explosion at the compound before she’s up and moving as soon as the shockwave stops buffetting her. Deafened and half-blind from the gasses and dust, she staggers in the direction Vi had run, wounded, towards the explosion - towards Jinx and towards that little girl Cait had glimpsed for just a moment, lit up against the monster of Vander, pistol glowing and jittering with far, far too much hextech energy clenched in her tiny hands. Cait doesn’t look that way for more than a glance; she knows what she’ll see.
She sees Jinx first, of course, the bright blue hair much easier to spot in the smog than the horrible black mop Vi’s sporting now. Jinx sees her back, and there isn’t even a flicker of the last year in her eyes, no acknowledgement of deadly enmity, just desperation. Then Cait sees the blood.
“No no no no, Vi, Vi!” Jinx is struggling with the deadweight of Vi’s body, and Cait watches her draw a bloody hand back to strike her sister before clutching at the thick black hair and dragging Vi’s face into her shoulder with a ragged cry.
Vi’s one visible eye cracks open, rolling, unfocussed. Alive, and Cait can breathe again. She drops her rifle, repeating Vi’s name as she rolls her over and Jinx lets her, cradling her sister's head on the way down.
She looks up at Cait, eyes pleading. “You! Please, you can’t let her die for me!”
In what mad world, Cait thinks with carefully suppressed hysteria.
“I won’t.”
It’s the spear wound in her side, further torn by her desperate dive to cover her sister and then by the explosion itself. The tight wraps around Vi’s ribs shift in a way that is wrong, buoyed on blood, splaying slickly apart. Cait strips off her jacket and packs it tight against the horrible flow, but her belt won’t work - Vi is too big, the clasp is wrong-
“Your belt, now.”
Jinx drops it in her hand, already there, and Cait can only be relieved. The clasp is tongued and it had been wrapped twice around Jinx’s frame. Cait cinches it tight over the jacket, heaving her weight against the leather. She just has to slow the bleeding enough to get Vi off the active battlefield around them.
“Come on, we have to go!”
Cait’s head snaps up so fast her vision swims. Jayce? How- he looks awful- it doesn’t matter.
“Help me with her.” Cait gets her legs under her, blood-sticky hands pushing under Vi. Jinx falls back, and Jayce kneels awkwardly in the space where she was, letting his hammer fall into Cait’s hands. He lifts Vi under the knees and shoulders, striding away through dead and stunned Noxians. Cait and Jinx exchange looks, both of them soaked to the wrist in Violet’s blood, and follow.
There is little enough resistance to their retreat. Vander had carved wide, bloody swaths through the Noxians before the hextech stunned them, and once Jinx takes the hammer- which has changed, what’s wrong with it - Cait still has her rifle. A de-helmed Noxian with thick shoulders and blood on her spear lunges up from nowhere and Jinx blurs, the hammer an awkward afterthought in her hands, Jinx cracks it broadside against the Noxians’ legs then seizes her by the hair. She holds the fully grown warrior at arms length, one handed, eyes sparking pink as they meet Cait’s. Vi is dying, they are surrounded, Cait is the only one properly armed. She takes the headshot and is back on Jayce’s heels before the Noxian’s body hits the dirt.
The lead doctor at the closest clinic is a fine-boned, black horned, no-nonsense Vastaya woman who couldn’t be more than five feet tall and who reacts with admirable efficiency and calm when three bloody strangers nearly break her door down carrying the pale form of a fourth. Cait presses her back to the clinic wall, unable to get a full breath, her eyes fixed on Vi as the three physicians swarm around her.
They cut Vi’s own shredded jacket away, then Cait’s makeshift bandage - Cait flinches from the sodden slap it makes when impacting the tile floor - and Vi’s rib wraps under it. If Cait were capable of being normal or sane right now she would look politely away, but she doesn’t. The blast had torn the gash in Vi’s side open wider, an ugly jagged crack in the pale sweep of her skin, deep red meat splayed open luridly among bruises. The Vastaya woman bends over the wound with a scowl and a pair of long forceps. Then she actually puts her gloved hand in Vi, pressing torn skin out of the way, and there’s a white, wet glimpse of bone or cartilage, Cait avoids vomiting through sheer force of will. The vital pulse of blood slows to a trickle.
One doctor comes bustling into the room with a tall, raw boned young woman in the short coat of a physician's apprentice, who sweeps her sleepy, dark eyes over the scene and promptly strips the jacket off and rolls her own sleeve right up to the armpit. Cait doesn’t understand until they bind off the apprentice’s arm high on the bicep and start to run a catheter from her to Vi. A universal donor, oh thank every little god.
Cait watches one of them sponge the dirt and blood off Violet’s torso while another pries Vi’s eyes open to shine a light in them; here’s a hurried conversation over her that Cait simply lacks the knowledge to follow. A drawer is unlocked and opened and they tip two full potions - standard ones, lacking the hard shine of Shimmer lacing - down Violet’s throat.
Sense memory catches Caitlyn off guard and knocks her back eight months, gasping. The pervasive smell of dry rot and fresh blood, the constant, droning buzz of neon under shallow, pained breaths, and the bright splash of old chalk on a wall. The startling, guilty twist of concern to desire, and the belly-deep need to care for this woman.
What a fine job she’d done.
“She should pull through. Thank goodness she’s got a thick skull. You will wait here a full hour for the transfusion,” the doctor nods sharply towards the donor leaning back in her chair and being given a tray of biscuits and honeyed tea by another apprentice, “and to let the potions start their work. Only then may you take her. At your leave we will come see her tomorrow to check the progress of healing and change the dressing.”
It’s the most perfunctory ask for permission Cait has ever heard and she is immediately soothed by it.
“Of course,” she says, carefully testing her ability to stay standing without the wall. “I’ll send a woman tonight to handle the payment and give the address; just send back the time you’ll want to arrive so we can send a carriage for you.”
She sees the Vastaya doctor blink rapidly, then actually look at Caitlyn - the recognition hits and then passes without a ripple.
She looks down her broad nose at Caitlyn despite being a foot shorter. “That is acceptable. You may clean up in the side room to the left. Until you depart, you let that poor thing rest. She’s a wreck.”
As if Caitlyn doesn’t know that.
Back at her home, Cait has Jayce put Vi in her bed, ignoring the look he gives her. He clearly has a lot to tell her, and she does want to hear it - she thought he was dead - it’s just that she knows her limits and she is right up against every one of them. She has instigated a war tonight. She cannot learn of whatever has Jayce back, alive and looking like he does, without at least a few hours of sleep. She cannot tolerate Violet being anywhere other than where Cait has ached for her to be for months. She catches a maid in passing and gets Jayce into a room where he can at least have a meal and bath while he waits for her to collect herself.
Jinx is somewhere below her in the bunkers, probably not as comfortable, but safe enough for now. Cait should care about that - hasn’t that been her goal for all these months? The reason for every atrocity, every single bad decision that had tightened around her into a trap of her own making, that she’d walked into so willingly?
She perfectly remembers the awful crack in Jinx’s voice as she pleaded for Cait not to let Vi die for her. Cait isn’t sure it has let mercy into her heart - she’s no longer sure what mercy feels like - but at the very least she can no longer think of Jinx as an…other, a malignancy to be cut from her city. At the very least they are both people who love Violet. Jinx hadn’t resisted at all as they took her away, just stared until her sister disappeared from her view.
Cait steps to the side of the bed, needing to indulge herself in at least looking. Cait truly hadn’t realized who the dark-haired straggler she’d jumped was until she looked down to see Vi underneath her. It had been an all-over shock of awakening, like being submerged in cold water when you’d been half asleep. Making the plan together had been less of a decision and more an acknowledgement that Vi was here and Cait could no longer dither around her own failures.
(And oh, hadn’t it stung to realize Jinx was the contingency against Cait’s possible betrayal?)
Absence has made Vi…bigger. With the horrible hole in her side reduced to a neat line of stitches and covered in clean white bandage, her shoulders and chest and abs are sharply defined even in unconsciousness, like Vi had pared away anything soft and unnecessary about herself. Or like she’d been living off illegal pitfights and alcohol for months. There’s a nocturnal pallor to her skin that isn’t all blood loss, and even with the potions slowly working away at healing her, she’s still bruised, scraped, and raw-knuckled. She’d looked healthier bleeding out from a stab wound in the deepest trench of the Fissure.
She’s beautiful, she’s everything Caitlyn has ever wanted, and guilt piles up hot and sour in the back of her throat.
Cait’s brain throbs in her skull and her skin feels twitchy; if she doesn’t do something, she’s going to have a breakdown. The only thing she could possibly stand to do right now is touch Vi and it’s questionable if that’s her privilege anymore. She sinks carefully to the edge of the bed and, trembling, slips her fingers between Vi’s, mindful of raw knuckles and torn cuticles. The dust of the battlefield is still caught in the creases of Violet's palm and the beds of Cait’s nails. She has so much work to do, so much to try and make right. She cannot think of anything but the taste of Violet’s mouth.
She jerks upright and strides into the bathroom, gathering towels, washcloths, two basins, soap. Violet is clean under and around the bandage on her torso, but the doctor had simply thrown a rough cotton top over the rest. Cait undoes the ties on the shoulders and the sides and lets it fall open, then stops. They’re just breasts, Cait berates herself, you’ve seen dozens. Stop being weird. The scolding doesn’t help; even hungry and pared down, Violet is lovely, the parts of her skin that never see the sun holding onto that delicate translucency Cait has found particular to redheads. If Cait can’t get a hold of herself she’ll have to let a stranger do this for Vi, and even now she’s fairly sure Vi would pick her as the lesser of two evils in that situation.
“Truly, what a martyr you are,” Cait mutters at herself as she soaps a wet cloth and starts removing red dust and old blood from Vi’s skin.
The potions are already wiping away the colors but Cait can still see the bruises layered on bruises across her ribs and a short slice above her right breast that looked disturbingly like a barely avoided stab, all exposed as Cait works. They feel like a personal accusation and Cait shoves it all down to fall into the rhythm of cleaning a section of skin, wiping away soap, drying, moving on. She moves from torso to shoulder, over the tender underside of Vi’s arm and down to her fingers on both sides.
It’s greasepaint in Violet’s hair, and it takes most of the bar of soap and several water changes to get out enough of it to satisfy Cait, and she’s scrubbed the soft skin of Vi’s hairline and the backs of her ears pink by the time she’s done. Cait lets herself run her fingers through the full depth of Vi’s clean hair a few times. It’s so thick that it’s no wonder Vi shaves half of it off, or else she’d look like a sheepdog.
She can’t put the dirty smock back on her, but there’s a top in the back of her wardrobe that snaps shut - she’d used it when she was seventeen and had to get her appendix removed, requiring something easy to remove with a hole in your abdomen. It was too big on her then, so it should fit Vi. She retrieves it, and does not look at Vi, spread out half naked in her bed. If Cait squinted, the white of the bandage would blend into Vi’s skin - she’d look asleep and this would look real, and not some terrible circumstance.
To get at her back, she rolls Vi towards herself, onto her uninjured side, flustered all over again by the heat her body puts off, the unexpected weight of all that muscle. She gathers her washcloth again, leaning over Vi’s side, and promptly drops it. The gears on Violet’s neck and the struts down her arms were impossible to miss, but Cait never would have guessed the ink went so far. She traces her fingertips lightly over clouds of steam, the vent between her shoulders, the structures below splayed out like a mimicry of a ribcage. It reaches from the tender skin of her hairline and disappears down under the high waist of her trousers. Cait lets out a shaky breath and snatches her hand away, fumbling for the washcloth. She certainly has no permission to touch Violet that way; being willing to work with her again doesn’t mean Vi still desires her.
It’s mercifully quick to wash her back, at least; it’s mostly dust, a few dried rivulets of blood. She slips Vi into the borrowed shirt and rolls her gently back onto it, then slips the other arm in and snaps it closed. As she’s smoothing down the front, Cait’s arm bumps something that shifts, and when she looks down, at first she doesn’t quite register what she’s seeing. Of all things, surely Vi wouldn’t have kept that. But she did - the leather is worn and stained and the badge itself removed from the leather holder, but this is the enforcer badge she’d handed Vi all those months ago. It was an ill-considered, grasping, grief fuel decision that had been rightfully rejected at first. Yet here it is, worn on Violet’s belt. Cait tucks it back into place with shaking hands.
Cait slips off the edge of the bed to the floor, unable to bear it, everything she had thought she wanted for a year churning in her stomach. She had let guilt and rage and grief make a monster of her. What would her mother think?
Cait shudders and gasps in hot humiliation at the very idea of her mother seeing any of this, and hides her face in her knees, eyes stinging with tears. Cassandra had hated excuses, hated prevarication, and was always terribly jealous over what she considered her family's city. And Caitlyn had let a warmonger roll her over, allowed this occupation, this unrest and violence all just to try and make herself feel better! To feed an obsession that served no one in the end! It doesn’t bear consideration.
The one part Cassandra might actually have approved of, Cait thinks with hysteria edging up her throat, was Maddie. She had been pressing Cait to stop, well, call it ‘dating around’, and settle down in the last year, and Maddie was a nice enough girl. Cait had tried very hard to want her.
Cait winces as her back twinges, and she curls herself against the side of her own bed, one arm still up, fingers tracing gently across the fine, strong tendons on the back of Violet’s hand. She should have apologized to Maddie for breaking things off so abruptly, for starting them in the first place - poor little thing deserved that, at least. Because Cait had never wanted a nice girl her mother might approve of. She wants Violet. She wants all the pieces of her, her anger and protectiveness and her bad decisions and her big, messy heart.
Everything from the past twenty-four hours tries to come flooding back - but particularly a brief moment of quiet in which Singed’s bloodthirsty beast had pressed his forehead gently against his daughter’s, and the illuminating joy on Vi’s face. Cait thinks she had never quite understood Violet until then.
People always said they’d do anything for their family, but they just so rarely meant it.
The one fragment of mercy in the whole shitshow was that Vi had been unconscious when her father died again.
Cait hauls herself to her feet, aches and pains from the fight pinging around her exhausted body. She sheds her jacket and boots mechanically, and then she sits on the empty side of her bed, slumping down into the pillows not piled around and under Vi. She only means to relax, but she’s more drained than she thought, and sleep reaches up for her immediately.
A noise wakes her some hours later. Vi’s brow is furrowed, sweat on her temples; her mouth pulls down, breaths huffing out unevenly. Cait leans over her, careful not to jostle her side. She’s not waking, Cait thinks, this is just the strongest of the drugs they’d injected her with wearing off. Vi flinches again, whining in the back of her throat, and Cait reaches out on pure loving reflex, automatic, assured, to cradle Vi’s face. She murmurs soothing nonsense, thumbs stoking gently under her eyes until the pained twitches stop and V’s breathing evens out, her body going slack again. Cait strokes her forehead, her cheek, her jaw, soft and light. The bruises and scrapes have faded - Vi’s skin is whole and perfect in the moonlight, her mouth soft. Cait takes her hands away and settles back on her side of the bed. Sleep comes slower this time.
Caitlyn wakes to sunlight, warm gold light staining Vi’s skin and gilding the little flyway strands of her hair. After months of numb coldness, of feeling like her soul in her body had been knocked out of place like a dislocated joint, Caitlyn lays there in the morning sun for long minutes feeling warm and whole and aware and she wonders if, somewhere in the ruins of the compound, Ambessa feels at all smug about being right. She’d known somehow that Violet should be kept far, far away from Caitlyn. How much tragedy could have been avoided if only Caitlyn hadn’t been a fool, hadn’t lashed out cruelly in betrayal and grief, if she’d just gone back for her.
She thinks sometimes she should have left Piltover immediately, taken her father and Vi and retreated to grieve. It would have left the remains of the council and Ambessa unchecked, but would it have been better? For her, certainly, she would not have had to realize what kind of person she actually was. For the city? For the cities, she cannot say.
Weariness threatens to pull her under again, and she gets up. Regrets won’t fix this.
After she’s clean and dressed, she’s coming up against the issue of having things she has to do but being incapable of leaving Vi alone when there’s a soft knock on the door. She cracks it, pistol in hand, to find Loris, deep concern and resentment lined on his face, his massive body one big, determined slump. Relief floods her.
“I can take shift,” Loris says, his eyes flicking over her shoulder at Vi’s still form. “You’ll need rest, and I - I owe her. Shoudn’tve left her.”
Cait could weep. Loris, who Vi liked, who’d disliked so strongly what Cait had become, and who never said a word about the open secret of his odd friendship with Vi. She could trust Vi with him. She wonders absently if he trusts her with Vi.
“Don’t beat yourself up too much. She’s remarkably good at being an ass.”
He huffs and it doesn’t quite make it to humor. “Too right. Still-”
Cait nods once. “The doctor will be here past six - Margot is bringing them. Anyone but them or I tries to come in, you are to stop them however you deem fit.” She gives her pistol a quick double-check and hands it over. “If she wakes before I'm back, let her know where I am. I have work to do.”
She walks from the room, looking back until the click of the door closing blocks Vi from her view.
Then she goes to find Jayce. She needs information, and she needs answers. She needs a plan.
In the end, her two biggest decisions are so simple. First, she can either cling to her hatred of Jinx, or her love for Vi, and Cait is so very tired of hating. Second, she knows she can fail here and they all die, or she can take the hit and whatever comes with it and give Mel a chance to save them all.
She’d like to say she thought of her city and its people, or her family’s legacy when she did it, but she didn’t. Her mind was full of Violet, and what Cait would do to not leave her alone again. It turns out the answer to that was: anything at all.
“I’m not made of glass,” Cait grumbles when Vi once again removes Cait’s hand from the more interesting and tempting parts of her body. There are no more tubes in Cait, she can shower on her own now - with a chair - and walk across her room. It’s fine.
“You are still sixty, seventy percent stab wound right now. How are you horny?” Vi says, and kisses the back of Cait’s hand, her palm, then digs her little canine into Cait’s knuckle when Cait pushes her thumb past her lips.
“I have you in my bed, don’t I?” Caitlyn says, because she really doesn’t know what Vi expects of her. They’re mostly whole, the cities are mostly whole, and Vi is here in her bed.
“Mmm,” Vi says, tongue rolling sweetly against the pad of Cait’s thumb before releasing it with a soft pop. “Well, flattery might get you fingered if you promise to settle the fuck down.”
Caitlyn takes as deep a breath as she can. “Fine”.
“Fine,” Vi mocks, sweet and teasing and she settles in at Caitlyn’s side, tugging the sheet down.
Her bruises aren’t too sore any more but they are in the lurid, multi-color stage of healing. Vi doesn’t seem to care, though, and the look on her face and her little sigh when she uncovers Cait’s body does make her feel a little better.
“Take your shirt off,” Cait says. Then, annoyed by the flat, raised-eyebrow look Vi gives her, adds, “I’ll be good, I just want to see you.”
Vi’s pretty face goes soft.
“Yeah, yeah alright,” she says, reaching back to pull her shirt over her head before settling back against Cait’s side.
Something further relaxes in Cait, softening the tension along her spine. Vi’s body is solid, heavy, and she pours off heat like a furnace. Cait can’t stop looking at her in a way that makes her feel giddy, teenaged, eagerly fumbling her way up under a girl’s skirt for the first time.
She keeps her eye open to watch Violet’s hands on her, wandering everywhere there isn’t a bandage or a bruise, fitting her fingers into every curve and line of Cait’s body like bumps of her ribs and the lines of her arms are just as attractive to her as the flattened weight of Cait’s breasts as she lays on her back.
Cait nuzzles her face into the shag of Vi’s freshly trimmed hair and lets the attention sink into her like a warm bath. Violet is apparently determined to find every sensitive inch of her. The insides of her arms just below the elbow are shockingly sensitive, and there’s a spot just below her floating ribs that makes her shiver and her breath catch. By the time she leans down take one of Cait’s nipples in her mouth, Cait isn’t thinking at all, and she moans and reaches across to clutch at Vi’s hair against the protests of most of the right side of her body
Violet catches her wrist and presses it back down to bed, and worse, takes her mouth off Cait’s breast.
“There were rules, Cait.”
“I was only-”
“Rules! I am really trying not to get mauled to death by you or by your doctor. Please?”
“Fine.”
“Thank you.”
Caitlyn is slightly mollified by how Vi immediately puts her mouth back on her nipple. Her eye drifts shut and she lets herself relax, the constant ache of her healing body sweetening and softening under Vi’s unhurried attention and the sweet little noises she makes in the back of her throat. She has to curl her fingers into the sheet when Vi props herself up on her arm with a warm slide of skin, lifting the weight of her other breast in her hand to kiss across her chest and close her mouth around that nipple too.
“Oh, you’re so sweet,” Cait sighs, turning her head, seeking, and Vi shifts the arm she’s leaning on enough to brush her fingers across Cait’s cheek.
By the time Vi’s fingers slide into her pussy, Cait feels almost half asleep, dreamy and floating. Vi’s kissing her breasts, her neck, her mouth at whim, unhurried, but Cait still feels like she can’t keep up, unable to do much more than open her mouth for the press of Vi’s tongue or tilt her head to give her better access to her neck. Vi never pushes, never moves her mouth or her fingers with anything like urgency and it’s the most relaxing orgasm Cait’s ever had, rolling over her like a warm tide and leaving her head full of nothing but pleasant static. Vi kisses her sweet and shallow then pulls back and rests her forehead against Cait’s and they breathe together for a while.
Cait doesn’t realize she’s closed her eye until the bed shifts and she looks down to see Vi rubbing her thighs together, the muscle of her stomach tensing.
“Let me watch you do it?” Cait says.
“What,” Vi says, but she stops her restless shifting and Cait sees her knees draw up slightly.
Cait pulls away enough to look Vi in the eye. “I want to watch you make yourself come,” she says. Color blooms high on Vi’s cheeks, and isn’t that adorable.
“That’s…” Vi begins. Cait eases her body onto its side as far as she can without pulling stitches and pillows her cheek on her arm, watching Vi get helplessly distracted by the shift of her breasts. Whatever she was going to say, it definitely wasn’t ‘weird’ or ‘a bad idea’. Cait saw the twitch of her hand towards the waistband of her pants when Cait said it.
Vi is still pressed close, and Cait doesn’t have to reach out much to hook a finger in the drawstring of Vi’s pants and tug it loose.
“Unless you’re going to let me after all?” Cait really wishes it wasn’t a bluff, that a single lovely, slow-motion orgasm hadn’t taken it out of her utterly.
Vi tries to scowl at her and manages a very cute pout. “Are you blackmailing me into jerking off for you?”
“Yes.”
“Why is that hot?” Violet complains, and shoves her hand into her pants.
Cait catches her lower lip in her teeth as she watches Vi’s wrist twist, the spread of her knuckles denting the thin cloth then disappearing as she presses in. A sigh shudders out of her and she hides her face against Cait’s neck. Cait rests her hand on Vi’s forearm to feel the muscles move and watches Vi shift uncertainly until there’s a hitch in her breathing and her top leg twitches up, squeezing her fingers tighter.
“Just like that, you gorgeous thing.”
Violet whines and her teeth scrape harmlessly over Cait’s shoulder, her tits sliding against Cait’s as she falls into it further, rocking frantically against her own hand, muscle flexing across her sides as she puts her back into it. Cait kisses the crown of her head and slips her hand into the soft clench of Violet’s thighs, splaying her fingers and gripping to feel the flex of those long muscles.
“I can’t wait to do this to you again,” Cait says, because there is a sea of greed for this woman inside her and she needs Vi to know.
Vi pulls in a hard, panting breath that catches and holds in her throat as her hips hunch once, twice, and the air breaks out of her on a moan, her shoulders heaving as fast breaths spill hot and humid over Cait’s skin.
“Oh, good girl,” Cait says, brushing kisses along Vi’s sweaty hairline. She smiles when Vi’s whole body jerks and she lets out a gulping little moan.
Vi’s breathing slowly steadies, and she wipes her fingers on the inside of her pants as pulls her hand out. She eases up for a kiss, slow and clinging, and her fingers are still a little tacky on Cait’s skin when Vi helps ease her down on her back again, tucking the sheet around her and furrowing her brow worriedly when Cait has to breathe through a deep twinge from some still-healing bit of her insides.
“I’m fine, Vi.”
“If your doctors kill me I want you to give Sevika my gauntlets, it’ll piss her off so much.”
“Stop, don’t make me laugh.”
Cait keeps her fingers entwined with Vi’s as she settles back, already feeling lassitude dragging at her bones. She still can’t seem to manage more than a handful of hours awake at a time. Her eye shuts and she can feel Violet settling in next to her.
“Down for the count, cupcake?”
“Told you I’d settle down.”
The last thing Cait feels before sleep rolls her under is the brush of a kiss across her cheek.