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Crazy
Vi is coming out as Caitlyn is coming in, hopping down the steps of the police station, shrugging on her battered leather jacket. She’s shed the husk of her official persona just as much as she’s shed her uniform, winking shamelessly as she passes.
“Sheriff,” she smirks, seeming entirely too energetic for someone who’s just gotten off a night shift. Caitlyn nods a greeting, keeping the smile to her eyes, pure professionalism.
But she stops at the top of the stairs, hesitating outside of the door. She turns around to watch that bedraggled, rough-edged rookie swing herself onto her motorcycle and coax it to life. It purrs, then coughs, then roars; Vi looks back over her shoulder and Caitlyn is caught staring. She turns to go inside quickly, but not quickly enough to miss seeing her pull out onto the road without a helmet, breaking a local bylaw before she’s even out of the parking lot.
Caitlyn would have to be absolutely crazy to nurture any interest in her.
—
There is a buzzing sound coming from the ladies’ washroom.
It’s three in the morning and there is a buzzing sound coming from the ladies’ washroom.
Caitlyn sets her teeth, sets her face, sets her entire skull into one rigid disapproving mask of steel, and goes to face this absolutely unacceptable situation.
Whatever she encounters, it has to be dealt with. She cannot ignore this.
Her heels click with loud anger, and she hopes they signal a siren warning to the offender. Please hear. Please stop by the time I get there. This chastising is going to be awkward enough as it is. Good grief, have some bloody self-control.
But the sound is still going when Caitlyn’s at the door, and she pushes through and pushes it open.
And there’s Vi, perched up on the counter, one foot on the edge of the sink, contorted into a tight twist.
Shaving the side of her head with an electric razor.
Oh thank goodness.
Vi’s portrait of concentration in the mirror is disrupted when she spots her senior in the reflection. She shuts off the razor and turns to face Caitlyn, looking guilty to be caught, looking guiltier when half a heartbeat later she hops down off the counter.
“Oh, hey, sorry, I – sorry boss, I always clean up when I’m done, I didn’t know you were in – “
Caitlyn holds up her hands for silence, relieved her first guess was wrong but still less than happy.
“You should be doing your grooming at home, officer,” she says, going with the momentum of her pre-scripted rebuke. Vi winces, and Caitlyn feels immediately guilty.
“I would, yeah, I definitely wouldn’t ever use the dye here, it’s just the shaving, see, I kinda - I don’t have steady power at home,” Vi says, a confession given with a plastered-on smile and an empty, glassy shame in her eyes.
Caitlyn stands stunned for a moment.
She looks from the woman’s uncertain face to the pink prickles of quarter-inch hair on the bathroom counter.
“How long have you been using this bathroom to do that?”
“Since I started working here,” Vi says, and a little life returns to her face. She’s smirking. She knows Caitlyn, the master detective, is surprised to have seen no clues, not a single trace of this crime.
Caitlyn presses her lips together, thinking.
“Just don’t sit on the counter,” she says, at last, and then turns away.
She would have to be an absolute lunatic to nurture any feelings for this woman.
—
“CAITLYN,” Vi screams, audible through the halls, audible through the thumping, hissing, piercing shriek in her ears. Caitlyn gropes to find the floor below her, struggles against the pain to rise.
Should she call out? Or keep her whereabouts hidden from whoever set off the bomb?
Caitlyn pulls herself up on sheer willpower, limps towards the door, keeping low. Her rifle is gone, somewhere in the rubble; she goes for her pistol, holds it loose and lowered. Every move is agony.
Around the corner, a nightmare unfolds. Five gunmen – none of them have seen her yet. Their eyes are on a screaming behemoth of silver metal and pink hair.
“I’m coming, Sheriff!!” the young officer snarls, charging forward into the storm of bullets, rounds ricocheting off of oversized heavy-plate hands.
Caitlyn scans the room, spots a sixth gunman. Vi won’t be able to protect herself from that angle – he’s lining up the shot.
The sheriff lifts the pistol and fires once; the threat crumples.
Vi presses forward, smashing walls, crushing ribcages. Now there are four. Now there are three.
Now there are none.
Panting, bleeding, sweating – crying? no – Vi finally sets eyes on Caitlyn.
“You’re alive,” she says, rushing to the sheriff’s side.
“It would seem that way,” Caitlyn wheezes.
“Fuckers tried to catch us in an ambush,” Vi snarls, as if it isn’t obvious, as if this isn’t her boss she’s speaking to. She scoops Caitlyn up in one massive hand, jarring her injuries. Caitlyn hisses in pain, Vi swears some more, apologizes. “Let’s get you out of here,” she says, and with one hand breaks open an entire wall to get them to safety an entire thirty seconds faster than heading for the front door.
Caitlyn tells herself again that she would have to be absolutely, completely, one hundred percent –
“I gotta be crazy,” Vi mutters, just barely audible, stealing a glance that was probably meant to be subtle. “Signing up to work for the cops. You’re gonna get me killed.”
They drop down into the alleyway, covered in the dust of the demolished wall. Bits of brick patter behind them, clacking off of dumpster lids. Vi looks at her again, sees her looking back.
Suddenly Vi is grinning at her.
And before she can stop herself, Caitlyn grins back.
Shit.
Karaoke
“Cause I do~on’t care!” Vi croons into her microphone, shoulders and hips rolling with the music, dim lights catching on her piercings as she tosses her head.
Caitlyn suddenly decides her partner was right to insist they go to the department karaoke night. If she’d passed on participating in the ritual like she has the last five times, she would have missed this sight.
The music bobs and bounces and struts along, and Caitlyn isn’t even listening to the words as much as she is absorbing them through her skin accidentally while she does her best to breathe in deep lungfuls of everything Vi.
In the glow of the screen and the cheering back-up vocals of Piltover’s brave and blue, Vi has come alive.
Caitlyn’s fallen into the trap of thinking of Vi as the crass one, the one that fumbles to manage small, delicate operations and struggles with conversation when faced with the social elite.
How could she have forgotten this Vi, lit by the stage lights of her passion, pure charisma.
Something between violent rock and roll and purring jazz, she dances on Caitlyn’s heartstrings and plays the bow of her body with effortless skill.
Vi might not be a politician, but Caitlyn shouldn’t ever forget the fact that everybody in the station loves her.
This power chord elemental flicks her eyes at Caitlyn and traps her note by note with a curling smirk as she purrs, “ – but I don’t want the next best thing.”
And surely everybody sees, everybody knows the significance, all her employees are now thinking about her personal life in ways they shouldn’t even begin to consider, and – and surprisingly, she doesn’t care, because the thrill of having her lover sing to her like this in public is new and exciting and Caitlyn is, for the moment, blissfully enthralled.
“So I sing~” Vi continues on, still smirking, but turning her eyes back to the screen to belt out her lines.
She has to know what she’s done to Caitlyn with this performance.
Or does she?
It doesn’t feel like mischief or trouble-making… Vi isn’t celebrating a victory. She’s celebrating herself. She’s completely unfettered in this three minutes and fourteen seconds, freer even than she is in the shower or as she’s cleaning dishes, where she’s always loved to sing.
The song ends, and Caitlyn finds herself overflowing with the intensity of just how much she loves this woman, how much she loves to see her happy.
She’s not about to get physical in front of the rest of the department, but when Vi slips out of the private room booked for their outing - to hit the bathroom and empty out some of the beer she’s consumed, she announces - Caitlyn follows her, confirms they’re alone, and kisses her with a single climbing note harmonized across hunger, respect, and adoration.
Vi grins, blinks, grins wider.
“Whazzat for?” she asks, all too aware that Caitlyn doesn’t normally like public displays of affection.
“Because you’re incredible, and I can’t believe you’re mine.”
Vi turns red – she’s so transparent when she drinks – and beams back at her.
“Dunno what I did to deserve that.”
“Go pee,” Caitlyn says, nodding at the stall door that Vi was charging towards a moment ago.
They share a smile, and then part again. Caitlyn swings by the bar to pick up a round of shots for the entire group – partly to explain her disappearance, partly because she’s feeling suddenly magnanimous. There’s a whole night ahead of her of watching her love like this, she thinks with a thrill.
And at the end of the night, she’s the one that gets to take her home.
Black Tie Affair
She looks good in pinstripe.
She doesn’t twirl in front of the mirrors, no, not her Vi. She tilts one shoulder towards the mirror, then the other, eyeballing the cut of the jacket, adjusting the tilt of the hat.
Caitlyn feels a rush of something giddy and young barreling recklessly down her veins.
Angular, bold, dark. Vi looks sharp, yes, but she looks dangerous, too.
Like the hired muscle who hovers behind the shoulder of her employer – the one with the sparkle in her eye that says she’s dangerous because of her wits and her experience, and not just her biceps.
You mess with me, that classy reflection murmurs, smoke and gravel and strong liquor, you’re making a hell of a mistake.
Vi puts a hand in the pocket of the waistcoat, lifts her chin in response to the challenge of her doppelganger, and suddenly smirks.
“I like it,” she says.
“I like it too,” Caitlyn says, allowing a flicker of that fire to warm the edges of her words.
Vi hears it.
She hears it, and she catches Caitlyn’s eye in the mirror, and cranks up the volume on her cocky expression. Caitlyn’s heart and body answer together in time, the confident plucking piano notes of love backing the excited brassy gambol of her sudden desire.
Dangerous indeed.
Sooner or Later
Vi is sprawled over Caitlyn. There are crumbs on her side of the bed that Caitlyn can’t reach to brush off onto the floor without disturbing Vi, no matter how much it bothers her to know they’re there.
Caitlyn knows how to pace herself with a pizza, but Vi always overeats whenever they order from the place that brushes the crusts in garlic butter.
She used to overeat every time they ordered pizza together, but now it takes the garlic butter crusts to flip that mysterious switch in her brain.
A thought crosses Caitlyn's mind – that Vi’s like a feral dog taken in from the streets that doesn’t understand there’s no need to put all the food in front of her into her stomach, in case there isn’t more where it came from when the sun rises again.
She thinks Vi might start snoring or drooling, nestled so comfortably with her cheek pressed right in the center of her chest, just above her stomach. She doesn’t, though. Cait suspects she’s not asleep so much as recovering with her eyes closed.
She’s still got her big grey sweater on, and Caitlyn's sure she must be too warm – she feels like the burning hot engine of a Yordle-made chopper pushed to its limit, and she even has one of her legs tucked under the tousled covers up to her knee.
The sheriff reaches out and strokes her face, knuckles along the edge of darkness where the timid light put out by the little reading lamp can’t quite make the journey over her cheek bone. A smile appears on her face, and Cait knows for sure now that she isn’t asleep.
Caitlyn's legs are sweating, trapped under Vi, but she likes her like this, draped over her like a shipwrecked sailor clinging, exhausted, to the beach where life has finally allowed her grasping hands to find purchase.
Caitlyn settles her palm across the bottom of Vi's jaw and the top of her neck, and closes her eyes, wills the control from her limbs, wills the last wisps of tension from her muscles.
She’ll have to ask her to reposition sooner or later, because she knows she won’t be able to sleep fully clothed and trapped beneath a furnace, but Cait's comfortable enough for now.
Give the option between sooner or later, she decides that tonight she’ll go with ‘later’.
Colour Coordination
Caitlyn doesn’t entirely understand why it’s important to Vi to wear her gauntlets today of all days, but she hasn’t been with this absurd, passionate, vulnerable woman for ten years to tell her no to something so ultimately inconsequential.
And she does kind of understand it, when she stops to think about Vi’s relationship with her gauntlets.
She thinks about the times that Vi has thrown those gauntlets between an incoming assault and Caitlyn’s significantly less armored body.
She thinks about the endless hours Vi has spent hunched over a workbench repairing, improving, tuning, experimenting.
She thinks about what Vi has told her about how they first came into being, about their very first purpose.
She thinks about the weight of those giant metal fists on a scraggly undernourished fourteen year old.
She thinks about the thousands of ribs Vi has broken with those knuckles, and then she thinks about the soft affection of a single one of those murderous digits curled gingerly but confidently around her lower back.
She thinks about how the smell of them – crackling hextech and oil and the tang of metal – instantly relaxes her now, after all these years, knowing it means Vi is nearby and always ready.
She thinks about the deeply personal tattoo of the inner mechanism of Vi’s gauntlets that only she and Vi and a lucky Pilovian tattoo artist know is inked along Caitlyn’s left hip.
She thinks about peeling, prying, cutting their smashed remains off of Vi’s battered arms, her heart heavy with worry for her partner.
She thinks of a quiet rainy morning in early spring when one of those plate-sized fingertips touches her cheek with entirely human softness, and she collapses into the gesture and wraps herself around that hand and sobs into the cold metal and presses herself tight to its edges, clinging to every corner and wishing they didn’t reassure her this miserable day is as real as any other.
She thinks about the slow creep of sunlight into a small apartment bedroom, working its way inexorably towards the far edge of steel piled in the corner.
She thinks about Vi and tries to picture her without them.
Okay.
Maybe she completely understands.
She loves Vi.
She loves her rough edges and her insecurities, her smirks and her sighs, she loves her quirks and her unexpected shades of normality.
She even loves her terrible, terrible sense of style.
“I love you,” she says, wrapped around the woman, her cheek pressed to the shaved side of her scalp. “But are you sure? Jayce even spoke to his tailor and got a quote, it’s more than reasonable. We’re not even at the halfpoint of what we budgeted for.”
“I don’t wanna waste money,” Vi answers, the same answer she’d have given Caitlyn a decade ago, although without the hesitation or uncertainty that would have lurked in the shadows of a newly established relationship. “Besides, it’s exactly what I wanted.” She strokes a strong hand up and down Caitlyn’s forearm, slow, tender, reassuring. “I’m gonna get one of those red roses and put it on the lapel, it’ll be great.”
Caitlyn smiles and kisses the side of her face, quietly amused. Of course Vi thinks a red rose and a yellow tie and a grey shirt and purple shoulders will look “great”. Of course she does.
“What about maybe a purple or a black tie instead, love?”
Vi studies the outfit hanging over their closet door, giving the suggestion real consideration.
“Nah,” she says.
It isn’t until Caitlyn’s walking down the aisle towards Vi that everything falls into place and she actually understands.
The tie isn’t yellow. It’s gold.
It matches perfectly with the dramatically modified gold and silver gauntlets, gauntlets Caitlyn has never seen before this moment, gauntlets styled in such a way as to mimic the gold and silver bands they selected together one nervous, joy-bright afternoon. Vi shifts with that same sort of nervousness now, meeting Cait’s eyes and smiling the smile that means she’s teetering on the edge of fear and waiting for a sign of approval to push her over into pride.
Caitlyn bites her lip, swears to herself that she is not the sort of stupid sentimental ninny who cries at these things, and then beams so brightly across the thirty-something paces that still separate them that she’s sure she can see it reflecting in the gleaming brightness of her lover’s symbolic new knuckles.
Vi answers with the most delighted, adoring grin in her repertoire. She can’t close the gap between them fast enough.
The only thing Caitlyn questions about their relationship is how it could possibly have taken them so damn long to finally get here.