Chapter Text
She’d started drinking again.
Vi wasn’t entirely certain when that had happened. Sometime between when she’d managed to scrape herself off of the metal overhang where she’d screamed her throat hoarse yelling out to whatever god might listen to bring her sister back to her, and now, a bottle had been pushed to her lips, and she’d yet to pull it away.
It had been…
How long had it even been?
Thinking back on it was hard. That entire half a day she’d spent suspended on that shitty piece of the broken-down Hexgates, barely attached at all to the supports holding it up… she’d honestly expected them to crumple away at some point. That she, just like her sister, would fall into the void below.
She deserved to, right?
If she hadn’t broken down, if she’d been able to accept that Vander was gone, if she’d been able to–
The glass in her hand cracked, and it was that noise that broke her out of her self-flagellating spiral.
…Caitlyn had found her. Down an eye, with a couple of broken ribs and a bruised everything, she’d found her. It felt like it always had to be her. She’d have felt that romantic, maybe – that she always, somehow, managed to find her – if she still felt capable of feeling at all.
She’d helped Vi down from the overhang – or Ekko had, once Caitlyn had gotten word of Vi’s survival to him – and practically dragged her back to the Kiramman manor. Her father had been there, having survived the final battle, same as them. He’d wanted to take part, had wanted to protect the city of Piltover just like her, and Cassandra, but Caitlyn hadn’t had the heart to put her father in any danger.
She’d stuck him at an easy post somewhere at the very back of the lines, within the council building itself. The kind of place that was only going to get breached at all if they were all dead anyways.
And it hadn’t. Caitlyn and Mel had managed to fell Ambessa in front of the council itself. In front of Ambessa’s personal battalion, they’d slain the once-great warhead of Noxus. And the Noxians, as was their creed, recognized the strong. Ambessa had forfeited her right to command them the moment she’d lost.
They’d obeyed Mel’s order to stand down without question. Without so much as an errant word.
Vi was caught between thinking that beautiful, in a sick, twisted sort of way, and utterly revolting. But maybe that was just where her head was at these days.
What the hell had she even been thinking about? Cait’s dad?
Shit, yeah. Tobias had been… well, in a state at seeing Caitlyn, and her eye, and that only got worse when he saw Vi, and her arm. It was weird. She didn’t quite know when Tobias had started giving a shit about her, given he’d wanted her thrown out of their house a few months prior when last she’d seen him. Then again… he’d been grieving at the time. He hadn’t been himself.
Vi would know.
Jinx was dead.
Her sister was dead.
Vander was dead. Again.
Loris and Maddie were dead.
Pretty boy and his partner were dead. She’d not really cared all that much about the latter, but the former she’d had a sort of… odd bond with. Caitlyn had loved him, too. Looked to him like an older brother.
She’d been the one to find the remains of his hammer; the Hextech stone within it having apparently been whisked away by a flock of ravens. Caitlyn had been distraught; having lost perhaps the only actual memento she might’ve had of him.
Tobias had taken a look at his daughter’s injury. It had been him to ultimately say that, while there was a chance she might be able to gain sight back in her left eye, said chances were grim at best.
He’d looked so… gone, saying it.
There’d been… not a ceremony, because calling it that would’ve been giving it too much credit, but a gathering that day. Probably a bit more than twenty-four hours after the attack had finished, and the Noxians had fully retreated.
Really, it had been a census. To see how many people were alive, and how many were unaccounted for. They were counting the bodies, but only so many of them could be identified. Some were missing… large portions, and a good many were left unaccounted for, with families screaming from every which way a gaggle of names that Vi rarely, if ever, recognized.
But occasionally… occasionally she would. She saw the younger sister of the girl she’d carried back into the ramparts; the same girl who’d died in her arms. Vi told her the truth. The girl fell to the floor and sobbed.
Another were a mother and child, who had apparently been related to a man who’d been a part of Caitlyn’s initial strike team on Viktor’s cocoon. He’d been brave. Showed no fear.
Vi wasn’t sure why Caitlyn bothered saying that. It didn’t make anyone feel better.
Jinx hadn’t been afraid, falling into the Hexgates with their father’s reanimated corpse clasping onto her. She’d smiled up at her, even tried to encourage Vi in her final moments, with her final words.
She was still dead. Everything else was an empty platitude.
Ekko had been there. She’d pressed herself to him and wrapped her arms around his back and tried to keep it together, because she was the big sister, and she always would be, no matter how old he got, but then he broke, and…
She’d cried for a long time. The kind of cry that took the soul out of her, and poured it out into horrid, wretched screams. She’d only relented when she physically didn’t have it in her to cry any more.
She’d been so good at holding the tears back once upon a time. She’d not cried – before this last stretch of her life – since her first few beatings in Stillwater. Now, it felt like a single twinge on the wire was all it took.
Cait was there to help her up. It seemed like she’d decided that it was her job to hold the tears at bay, seeing as how everyone else was falling apart. As much as she’d have liked to tell Caitlyn that she could let her emotions out, too, she desperately appreciated having someone’s arms to fall into.
It was a relief to not have to pretend to be strong any longer.
Caitlyn had whispered words into her ears. Soothing things. ‘It’s okay’s, and ‘you’re allowed to feel’s.
It was almost funny, thinking back. She could remember Mel Medarda saying something the day that Caitlyn’s mom had gotten her a chance to speak in front of the ever-so-illustrious council of Piltover.
“You don’t know war.”
She’d thought the woman had sounded so high and mighty. Vi had thought her conceited, speaking about it from her ivory tower, sipping back champagne.
Now, knowing who her mother was… had been…
Having seen war…
She knew the woman was right.
Vi hadn’t known anything.
She never had. Just… pushing through the trench smoke with her bare hands, like it made a difference, with her eyes shut tight and her feet tied together.
They’d had sex when they got back. She and Caitlyn. Raw and desperate, just like what they’d had in that prison cell the day before, when they were both spurred on by the very real concern that they weren’t going to see another sunrise. Vi wasn’t sure she remembered any of that second time at all. Just… being hot, and sticky, and sweaty. She thought she told Caitlyn she loved her; something she probably should’ve saved for a time they were both a bit more emotionally available, but…
…It was best these days to just tell people how she felt. Runeterra seemed to find some sick glee in ripping away those she loved.
Caitlyn had been too out of it to give a response, either. Vi supposed that tracked.
She hadn’t slept that night. Caitlyn hadn’t either. They’d just laid there next to one another, disheveled, half-naked, and stared up at the ceiling.
There was a hole in it now. Some Noxian artillery had pierced right through it, and knocked out a whole chunk of the wall. As much as Caitlyn had wanted to protect her father, her decision to not hold him back, to let him at least do something, might very well have saved his life. He wasn’t here when half the roof caved in.
…Vi was glad. She was happy for Cait. She didn’t…
She didn’t want her to have to go through losing a parent again. She…
She’d suffered enough.
That wasn’t to say that Vi had totally forgiven her for half the shit she’d pulled. But she did love her. The cat was out of the bag on that front. She clung to Caitlyn like a life preserver in the open ocean. If Ekko had been able to stay, maybe she could’ve mourned with him, too. But Ekko had business to attend to in the undercity – counting what remained of the firelights, trying to bring some semblance of order to an undercity that now wondered what its role was in the world.
He seemed to be trying to bury his grief in work. Vi hoped that worked for him. She’d tried to do that, once. Dyed her hair black and painted her cheeks like some fucking clown and gotten the shit beaten out of her until she could barely keep a meal down. Sometimes it felt like her brain was still mush.
Hadn’t worked out so well for her, that was to say. In the end the thing that had kept her propped up back then was the same thing propping her up now; alcohol.
She could picture Loris sighing over her as he hauled her ass up a flight of stairs to her shitty one-room undercity apartment. He’d stuck by her longer than most other people would’ve without asking for anything in return. Until her spiral was so steep that he couldn’t cling on any longer.
He’d just… stopped showing up to her matches one day.
She hadn’t seen him again until she’d woken up in Cait’s bed; leaning over a chair, waiting for her to wake up.
She’d last seen him with three bolts sticking out of him, slumped over the controls of one of their Hextech railguns, unmoving.
She took a greedy sip of the glass in her hand, but nothing touched her lips but a few drops. She looked down at it, and realized that the crack she’d put in it had already spilled all of the liquid out onto the floor.
Yeah. That seemed right.
The door at the back of the room opened up. Vi peered over her own shoulder without much energy.
Caitlyn was there. She was wearing that turtleneck that she looked fucking gorgeous in. She was so soft, despite it all, and yet her singular eye still somehow burned with a fire that seemed impossible to extinguish.
Vi’s own had gone out. How Cait’s hadn’t, she didn’t know.
Cait didn’t say anything as she sat down next to her in front of the crackling fire. This had become… sort of their place to unwind – even if using that word felt grossly overly optimistic – over the past few weeks.
Gently, without making a fuss over it, Caitlyn reached over and took the cracked glass from out of Vi’s fingers. There was no fight in her to resist, and she understood Cait was just doing it to protect her, or to try to.
Wasn’t much point, but she appreciated the gesture in a distant sort of way.
“I’ve… been thinking about if I should say this or not for the past few days.”
She looked over at Caitlyn without much energy, at least wanting to pretend like she still had some left.
“What’s up?”
“I’ve been looking over some of the files on mother’s terminal,” Vi noted the way that Caitlyn could still never call anything that related to the Kiramman’s, or their legacy, as hers, despite the fact that she’d held ownership over them for months now. She didn’t say anything, of course. Vi knew Cait was still grieving in her own way for her mother’s death, even after all this time. “Mainly in regards to the Hexgates’ creation. The schematics.”
She nodded her head.
“There’s… something that…”
Cait was being oddly evasive.
“What?”
She looked away, running a hand down her arm and taking a breath through her nose.
“I… don’t want to get your hopes up.”
Somehow, Vi didn’t think that was possible anymore. There was jaded, and then there was… whatever the hell this was.
Realistic? Hah. Yeah. It was just realism to expect the worst at this point. She’d learned that she was as much a jinx as her sister was. Her own curse wasn’t quite as broad as hers, but it was just as potent.
Everyone she cared about died.
“Just tell me, cupcake.” She pushed out through her teeth, no longer having the ability to feign interest.
Caitlyn gave a quick nod, before seemingly bracing herself for the affects her words might have.
“…There’s a chance your sister’s alive.”
Sound faded away. The aches and pains still present within her body went with it. For the first time in a long time, her head cleared up, like she could see the colors of the world again, and she was only now realizing she’d been blind to them for so long.
‘Oh,’ Vi thought a bit dumbly.
Because despite what she’d thought, those words, in that moment, sparked within her the tiniest, most absent glimmer of hope.